Sunday, August 3, 2008

Liars and takers and hypocrites, Oh my!

Deroy Murdock over at National Review (link below) has a good column on offshore drilling for oil. He makes a lot of sense throughout but the quote that really got me to thinking was
"Currently mired in red tape, Chevron’s Destin Dome field off Florida could produce within
four years. Southern California deposits could yield within five to ten years. Besides, as
Confucius said: “The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is now.”"

With gas prices up near four dollars a gallon even Barack Obama is now saying that maybe he would consider letting the oil companies drill off the coasts as long as he also gets plenty of money to spread around to the folks who are researching energy sources too improbable to attract private investment. Obama is lying through his teeth of course. He has no more desire for the production of more oil than his supporters at Greenpeace and MoveOn.org do. Obama and his envirolooney supporters want energy prices high, they even want them higher than they are now. Ten dollars a gallon for gas would suit him and them fine - but not if it's going to cost him the election. So he's lying about this the same way he lied about sitting in that racist church for 20 years without ever once listening to a sermon.

But this is not to say that Obama is the only one lying about offshore drilling. President Bush is doing some mighty outrageous lying himself, and he's also doing some unbelievably hypocritical complaining about congress. President Bush has had seven years in office to do something about pressuring congress to allow offshore drilling and to allow drilling up in Alaska but he has done precisely nothing. Why he has done nothing is a very good question. The best explanation I can come up with is that he wanted oil prices higher than they were a few years ago because he was taking big satchels full of cash from his ten gallon hat wearing Texas oil buddies and taking even bigger satchels of cash from his keffiyeh wearing Saudi oil buddies. But I may be wrong. Whatever - the simple fact is that he has done nothing, nothing, about encouraging the development of new supplies of oil in this country until this year. If he had done something some of that oil might be flowing right now. He may want to allow drilling now, but he didn't want to allow drilling then when he could have made a difference.

As for John McCain, I'm not so sure he's a liar on this particular issue even though I think he's a world class in our faces liar on the immigration issue. But he certainly is being a major league hypocrite when he talks about offshore drilling now. He's been in the Senate for a couple of decades, but never before has he pushed hard for drilling offshore and in Alaska. Yet he's supposed to be a maverick with exceptionally well developed cojones according to both the English and the Spanish language media and he's certainly no coward. So I doubt he would have been quiet about the utter stupidity of not letting companies drill where the oil is if he really wanted to fight over the issue. He was, for instance, quite willing to put his cojones in a wringer big time when he fought very hard to keep the borders unguarded and to give amnesty, free education, free health care, welfare and citizenship to however many millions and tens of millions of people who can manage to sneak into the country.

All that said, Deroy Murdock is right in most of what he wrote, and Confucius was certainly right when he wrote that, "The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is now.”

We need to do research on other forms of energy production, but we also need to recognize that it's going to be decades before we are able to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. So it's going to gag me big time but I may end up having to vote for McCain despite how angry he has me about illegal immigration. At least he hasn't been actively fighting against drilling for new oil all these years, as Obama and the Democrats have, and at least he understands that having gas and heating oil run up to ten dollar a gallon in the next few years would not be a good thing, as Obama and the Democrats in congress don't.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTA1MTBlMjdhMjM4NWU4NDczN2IxM2RkNGExNWRjMDM=

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