A presidential commission of enquiry into the disaster has been established, but that has not stopped various folk pronouncing "British Petroleum" guilty as charged and demanding that it be stripped of its assets, forced into Chapter 11, barred from doing business in the US, or worse.
Such invective does not help the 11 men who died when the rig blew up, those whose livelihoods will suffer as the stinking, sticky tide laps at the beaches, those who depend on the oil industry for their jobs, or those who depend on its dividends for their retirement. Nor does it reflect well on America as a whole.
BP has certainly not made a great job of the aftermath, and its safety record was already justifiably under the spotlight after an explosion at one of its US refineries in 2005. But that does not necessarily mean it was culpable for what happened a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April.
And the spectacle of Mr Obama thundering back from Louisiana on board a 747 (consuming 10 tonnes of fuel per airborne hour) to preach about the need to "embrace a clean energy future" was absurdly ironic. The US is addicted to oil like no other nation on earth. But for the resources discovered in Alaska and the Gulf – provinces that BP did as much as any US company to develop – it would have been beholden to the likes of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decades ago. If its citizens want draconian curbs on deep-sea drilling and a super-tough regulatory regime, they can certainly have them. But they'll get five-dollar gasoline too.
The sound and fury emanating from Capitol Hill is partly political. With mid-term elections later this year, the president needs to be seen to be doing something to help the gulf states, especially since his predecessor was so conspicuously absent from that region in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina five years ago. Once the flow is stemmed and the elections are over, more rational voices may prevail.
In the meantime, the establishment of a $20bn compensation fund and news that the company has suspended its dividend payments for 2010 has left UK investors with a big hole to plug.
