There They Go Again!

Have they no shame? A flip through Fox News shows Fred Barnes, sleaseball extraordinaire, raving. The focus of his ire is the Dems. The Dems, huffs Barnes, won't let the legislature vote! They won't even let it vote! That's all the Republicans want. A vote. And the Dems, tyrants clearly in their brief time as majority party, are denying them that. Get it? All the Republicans want is democracy.

WRONG. The Republicans, as exemplified by Barnes, remain crass, unsportsmanlike, and, if corrupting the honest flow of information in a democracy is criminally disingenuous, criminally disingenuous. While the country struggles, Barnes and his buddies go about their business of introducing side issues and red herrings to keep the Reps from unseemly display of how they again and again support the oil lobby instead of their constituents. Barnes huffing and haranging about one of these particularly pink if not overtly red herrings keeps the nation's attention off its real business. Which is what? $4.00 a gallon gas and oil company profits busting through newly raised roofs. That's what.

Now the Dems, god bless their benighted souls, have had meaningful testimony on this matter. The testimony--from oil reps among others--has indicated that there is:
a) investment in oil by hedge funders as the dollar has collapsed thus driving up the price.
b) speculation run rampant.
c) increased demand from China and India.

If the cost of oil followed some kind of financial investment/profit margin formula, then it would cost less than $100 a gallon and maybe as little as $60 a gallon.

What do our disingenuous, not to say lying Republications do? They team up with the oil companies to yank the discourse away from real issues into the sidelight issue drilling on the small bits of land the government has set aside in the interest of the environment. They want the wildlife refuge in Alaska which they persist in calling "anwar" so presumably people will forget what their acronym stands for, and they want more land along the U.S. coast.

Never mind that they, according to their own testimony, own tons of land on which they are not drilling or that the oil under the land they want now will take at least 10 years to bring to market, or that refinery capacity will not change. Never mind that if they began destroying the envirnoment in their quest for profit tomorrow, the price of oil would not change.

Twist Twist Twist. Pick a slender truth from a complex issue, and twist it to serve a slender sliver of super rich people. This then becomes the issue that dominate our discourse.

Fred Barnes is a nothing, a blowhard who rips and runs and needs a bath. But the Republicans should be ashamed for betraying their constituents and the American people.