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=

I hope you're enjoying $4.00 Gasoline

I can't understand the talk about why we shouldn't permit drilling for new oil in Alaska and off the coasts because "it will take years to get to market." The very same folks making that argument are also arguing for massive government investments in alternative energy schemes (like wind and solar and tides and such) that will also take years and even decades to get to market.

It's not that I'm against wind and solar and tidal power, it's just that we know oil companies can find and develop oil fields, but we don't yet know how fast those alternative schemes can get off the ground and actually start producing significant energy. Solar power, for instance, still produces less than 1% of US energy needs, and the government has been "investing" in it since Jimmy Carter declared a crash program in 1970 or so.

Jimmy Carter also declared a crash government program to develop fusion power back in 1970 or so, but the believers in big government programs want to forget about that because the net result has been no energy at all.

There are a lot of dim bulbs in the Democratic Party who are addicted to pandering to the Al Gore wing of the so-called environmental movement which really wants us to freeze in the dark for our sins. Having prevented drilling in Alaska and offshore for the past 30 years they now want us to buy an argument that we shouldn't drill because it will take too long to get the oil to market.

Not that the guilt is all on one side here. Much to their shame the Republican Party has allowed this situation to continue to develop while it has held power over for the last 8 years. Republicans are now feeling good about President Bush who the other day lifted the executive order which prevents offshore drilling. But why didn't he do that on his first or his second or his six-hundredth day in office. It's true that the lifting of the executive order is not enough, Congress still has to act to lift the congressional ban on offshore drilling; but why didn't President Bush hold their feet to the fire sooner?