When do we ask the Sierra Club to pick up the tab for this leak? Everybody's focused on BP and Halliburton and Transocean...The greeniacs have been driving our oil producers off the land.
Heh, heh. How loony is that? Of course, Limbaugh deliberately tries to say the most outrageous things possible. That's his schtick, after all. But you have to wonder about the alternate universe inhabited by his dittoheads and teabaggers - and really by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and pretty much all of Fox "News."
I realize that many of my fellow Americans have very short memories, but doesn't anyone remember the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973? Even then, we were importing huge amounts of oil from some of the worst nations in the world because that's where the oil is. Oil is not a renewable resource, and when it's gone, it's gone. That's why big oil companies are trying to drill ever deeper, in ever harsher conditions, even deep in the oceans. And that's why we're sending huge sums of money overseas, to feed our oil addiction.
The Arab Oil Embargo should have been the shock we needed as a nation. The writing was clearly on the wall almost 40 years ago. We should have started a new Manhattan Project - a huge government-funded effort to begin to wean ourselves from an oil-based economy. But OPEC was smart enough to drop oil prices whenever we seemed to be getting serious (never very serious) about alternate energy. And in the "don't worry, be happy" Reagan years, we were quite willing to pretend that all was well. In an ant and grasshopper world, we were - and we remain - the grasshoppers.
Then came 9/11, when we missed another opportunity. Here's Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times:
President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America. I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change. It was the Texas oilman’s Nixon-to-China moment — and Bush blew it.
Had we done that on the morning of 9/12 — when gasoline averaged $1.66 a gallon — the majority of Americans would have signed on. They wanted to do something to strengthen the country they love. Instead, Bush told a few of us to go to war and the rest of us to go shopping. So today, gasoline costs twice as much at the pump, with most of that increase going to countries hostile to our values, while China is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in wind, solar, electric cars and high-speed rail. Heck of a job.
We had a government of oilmen. Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had made big money in big oil, and for political purposes, there's no way they would have asked Americans to make any sacrifices anyway. Remember, these were the people who actually cut taxes (mostly on the rich) during wartime. Yeah, we ran two wars on a credit card. Real smart, huh?
Of course, we never would have invaded Iraq - which hadn't attacked us, was actually the enemy of the people who had attacked us, and was no threat to America whatsoever - if it hadn't been for their huge reserves of oil. Remember how the war was going to pay for itself? Yeah, in the same way that we were greeted as liberators, huh? (Were Bush and Cheney ever right about anything?)
Meanwhile, there's global warming, a real and very serious threat. I've discussed that before, but let me just repeat two quick points: First, if you accept anything except the consensus of climatologists - the experts in this scientific issue - you're simply sticking your head in the sand and believing what you want to believe. They could always be wrong (none of us is infallible), but no one else is likelier to be right. And second, it's the ultimate of foolishness - and certainly not "conservative" - to keep changing the atmosphere of our only planet unless we know for certain that it won't cause problems.
And while idiot America still rallies around "drill, baby, drill," China is putting billions into alternate energy research. Yes, while America is still basing our economic future on the equivalent of buggy whips, China is moving forcefully and intelligently into the 21st Century. And since they're spending vast sums of money on such things, their economy is still growing strongly, even in this worldwide economic meltdown.
Admittedly, we started out in a hole, due to the spendthrift policies of the GOP - now newly re-branded as the "Party of No." Now, suddenly, they're the deficit police. (How funny is that?) And they're warning of inflation in our distant future, when deflation is the real threat in America, now that they've collapsed our economy. They're denouncing deficits (really, how can they do that with a straight face?) when this is a time when deficits make sense. You don't want deficits in good times, but we learned in the Great Depression of their great value during an economic collapse.
And just as in your personal finances, debt isn't always bad. It all depends on why you're borrowing the money. (Borrowing to pay for a college education is a lot different than borrowing to have a wild vacation in Hawaii.) When Republicans held power, they created record-breaking deficits just to give tax cuts to the rich and to wage war unnecessarily. If, instead, they'd invested that money in education, in scientific research, in alternate energy technology, or even in 21st Century infrastructure, we'd be far, far better off today. Heck, even if they'd used the money to balance the budget, we'd have been far better off!
But in the right-wing alternate universe, God created the Earth and gave it to human beings to despoil as we wish. There's no possible way we could ever destroy what he created, so we're perfectly free to foul our own nest. Besides, all good Christians will be raptured up into the sky any day now, so why worry about long-term impacts?
In the right-wing alternate universe, there's a bottomless bowl of oil under America, easy to reach if those damned (literally) environmentalists would just get out of the way. There is no global warming. There is no problem with pollution. Mountaintops are made to be leveled. And drilling in the oceans is perfectly safe, except when those clever environmentalists fiendishly sabotage drilling rigs. (At which point, the ocean will miraculously take care of the oil spill, anyway, as God intended.)
Environmentalists in this alternate universe are strangely powerful, and multinational corporations strangely impotent. Poor CEO's struggle against mighty tree-huggers. No politician dares to cross the king-makers in the environmental lobby. But, of course, they aren't really worried about pollution and clear-cutting and endangered species. No, not at all. In reality, it's all a giant conspiracy to set up a new world order of socialism, communism, fascism - and probably other "ism's" good Republicans have never even heard of - under a black Antichrist. Oh, and let's not forget the death panels!
In the right-wing alternate universe, quitting means that you're not a quitter. And only true American patriots advocate seceding from the Union. In the right-wing alternate universe, immigrants are always the scum of the Earth - except for our own immigrant ancestors, of course, who came to America from the
In the right-wing alternate universe, it's treason to criticize a president during wartime - but only if that president is a Republican. Torture is a traditional American value, but separation of church and state is not. Thomas Jefferson does not deserve to be in history books, and the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery (which was never as bad as liberals claimed, anyway).
In the right-wing alternate universe, since the ozone hole is no longer a big worry, that means we must have banned ozone-destroying chemicals for no reason. And the absence of a Silent Spring has nothing to do with our subsequent regulation of pesticides. Since the government cannot, by right-wing definition, do anything worthwhile (except to wage war, of course), those dangers simply must not have been real after all. Certainly, our actions couldn't have made a difference, could they?
In the right-wing alternate universe, you need Republicans to protect Social Security and Medicare from Democrats. In the right-wing alternate universe, a high-profile failure of abstinence-only sex education makes a perfect spokesperson for abstinence-only sex education. In the right-wing alternate universe, President Barack Obama is a socialist!
We laugh at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and all the other crazies, because we think they're so loony that no one could ever believe them. Heck, Democratic leaders eagerly pointed to Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party (and he, always the showman, was eager to don that mantle). After all, the vast majority of Americans couldn't possibly be dumb enough to go along with this stuff, could they? Could they?
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