There is a familiar old saying that oil and water don’t mix. To that now painfully evident axiom, another must be added: Oil and politics don’t mix either.

Or perhaps the opposite is true: They mix all too well. It is hard to tell the difference.

As the island of oil expands daily in the Gulf of Mexico, with its still-undefined but unarguably catastrophic effects, the buck-passing among all involved parties has reached hyperactive levels.

British Petroleum, bless its little corporate heart, has promised to pay all “legitimate” claims resulting from the spill. This statement will spread trial lawyers across the Gulf states faster than oil is spreading on the water.

With the disclaimer that I am absolutely, positively not offering financial advice of any kind, if I were a riverboat gambler type, which I am not, I would have been shorting BP stock like crazy. Even at current levels, there is probably still opportunity.

This is a foreign company that will be tied up in American courts for decades, denying claims made by American citizens. How do you think that will go? It may not go all that far, actually. You can bet there are lawyers deep in the bowels of BP already discussing bankruptcy. Speculation has begun.

Congress, meanwhile, has yet (June 1) to raise the paltry $75 million liability limit on such claims. Don’t worry. It will. The politics of re-election will overcome oil industry lobbyists any day now.

The president has finally leapt into the fray. After weeks of explaining that only the oil industry has the technology to deal with capping the well, an unpleasant truth if ever there was one, he has announced that the U.S. government is really, really going to supervise the operation from now on. Really. Yawn.

Paradoxes are appearing. While the big-government administration has done remarkably little in areas it could — getting the military involved in cleanup, leasing tankers to suck up oil — small-government advocate Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been begging for the federal aid his state is not getting.

Back in Washington, Minerals Management Service Director Elizabeth Birnbaum was scapegoated out of the way to give at least temporary cover to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. We shall see how long that cover lasts.

New permits for offshore drilling have been suspended; commissions and committees are being formed by the administration and Congress to study what happened; there will be lots of new regulations; there will be government inspection teams crawling over every drilling platform in American waters. Perhaps some of this will even do some good.

Blame is being spread to all quarters, and there is more than enough to go around. At the heart of it all is the 100-year history of the internal combustion engine, and the paradoxical demands it has created.

Coastal dwellers, who were only too happy to suck west Texas dry and tolerate oil wells on the Capitol grounds in Oklahoma City, don’t want to peer out their windows and see shallow-water drilling operations. Thus the platforms have moved out to mile-deep waters, where uncontrollable events can occur. Much of Alaska remains off limits.

Congress has reliably refused to increase gasoline taxes to European levels, where demand might actually fall and the true cost of depleting and damaging the environment might be recognized.

It would be wonderful if, once all the posturing and pandering is over, which cannot possibly occur until after the November election, we could at least learn something from all this.

Learn how to drill better, safer wells, certainly; but also learn that there are limits to what we know or can attempt; that, in the final analysis, we are fallible; that the people in charge are still just people.

Fred Wolferman lives in Southern Pines. Contact him by e-mail at fwolferman@sbcglobal.net.