Comedian Lewis Black has a solution for dealing with the oil company responsible for spilling millions of barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Black believes the U.S. should put the same effort into plugging the leak and cleaning up the spill that was put into attacking the oil-rich country of Iraq.

“I have a theory I’ve been postulating and I think you’ll like this,” Black told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Wednesday.

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“We went into Iraq because there was supposedly these nuclear weapons there. Now — and that we might get attacked. Might. Now, we have BP, which is a multinational corporation, and they act like countries. I mean they basically are countries,” said Black.

“They, as far as I can tell, are attacking us with oil. And so I propose we declare war and invade them,” Black suggested.

“They’ve got no standing army. We take over their buildings. We put the workers, their folks in internment camps and we just get their checks and do what we can with the money to solve the problem down there,” Black said.

While outlandish, Black is not the first comedian to wonder why the U.S. could put so much effort into attacking Iraq but appears helpless when it comes to the BP spill. Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart had similar thoughts Tuesday.

“It cannot be that the only thing our government is good for anymore is war. We have to at some point use the same urgency and preparedness that we brought to taking over other countries’ oil to cleaning up our own,” said Stewart.

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This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast June 9, 2010.

