Obama: High Gas Prices are Just Fine By Me, I Just Wish We Could Have Raised Them More Slowly
Update: Nurse Bloomberg Says Raise Taxes on Gas, It's the Only Way To Force People To Use Less

At Hot Air, video of the classic Kinsley Gaffe, that is, the mistake of a politician admitting what he really thinks.

This is not going to be a campaign issue because The Narrative (TM) is so powerful. Republicans, and only Republicans, want high gas prices, because it helps out their oil-company buddies. (This despite the fact that Republicans are fighting to increase supply and thus lower per-unit profits on petroleum.)

But of course the Democrats want high energy prices. High petroleum prices encourage conservation by punishing oil and gas use, and also make those much-heralded "alternative energy sources" more competitive, not by increasing the efficiency or lowering the cost of such hypothetical sources, but by raising the cost of their competition.

The gas tax holiday is not a good idea because it does nothing at all to cure the fundamental problem of ever-increasing demand and stagnant supply (in fact, it marginally exacerbates it), but that's not of course why Obama opposes it. He opposes it because he thinks that using gas and oil is inherently evil, and by decreasing (even temporarily) the cost for such use, we increase the world supply of Evil.

Again, the MSM will simply not report on the dirty little open secret that liberal elitist Democrats have long been the most eager supporters of skyrocketing energy prices. If the market had not accomplished this goal for them, they would have done so through taxes or by further restricting supply.

John McCain could beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild on this issue, but of course Mr. Courage and Integrity is too busy pushing the same idiotic policies forced upon him by the Big Bullies at the New York Times editorial table.

And while we're not speaking of drilling in ANWR -- check out Jonah Goldberg's pictures of this desolate tundra wasteland that we've made it such a high national priority to protect from even the slightest blight. 19 million acres of this barren ice-crap, and we can't even drill on 2000 of them.

In a rain forest, there's some truth to the idea that if you destroy even a small section of jungle, you wipe out a "whole ecosystem." Jungle life is ferociously diverse and changes acre by acre like a city changes neighborhood by neighborhood.

That's not the case with ANWR. The same stunted pygmy-grass and same arctic tundra-vermin in any particular acre of this ice-glinted shithole are the same ones you'll find in all 19 million acres of it. (That is, for those acres that can actually support complex life at all.)

Double Vision: ANWR vs. the Grand Canyon.
Can you tell them apart?

So we're not drilling because we fear that if we do some microscopic ice-worms might have to migrate a few acres to continue enjoying their wondrous lifestyles eating frost-lichens.

And John McCain supports this because he doesn't want liberals to say bad things about him.

At least Barack Obama has an ideological reason for his absurd position. John McCain merely has vanity.

Thanks to Dave at Garfield Ridge for the reminder about Goldberg's ANWR pics.

More: DrewM recommends another Goldberg column:

In this sense the whole area is really just a Rorschach test for the imagination. There's little doubt that for much of human history most reasonable people would have considered this spot the definition of the word "godforsaken." You need not look back, for evidence, to the ancient pilgrims who died on the frozen tundra. You could simply read an old copy of the Washington Post from 14 years ago: "[T]hat part of the [ANWR] is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life."

Two decades have intervened, and an environmental fatwa has been issued declaring that the word "pristine" is synonymous with "beautiful" or "sacred." Of course, anyone who has seen a mint-condition AMC Gremlin knows that pristineness and aesthetic appeal have only a coincidental relationship. Even ANWR fetishists concede that in the winter, with its complete darkness and 70-below-zero temperatures-not counting wind chill-this is no paradise.

But then, it's no paradise in the summertime either. During the winter, the entire coastal plain is covered by a vast tarp of ice; when the sun comes back, the resulting thaw creates, well, lots of puddles. These patches of freestanding water pock the flat tundra for as far as the eye can see; that's why this barren region is the only place the U.S. government recognizes as both a desert and a wetland. The water in an old tire can breed thousands of mosquitoes; a puddle in a junkyard, millions. ANWR is the Great Kingdom of the Mosquitoes.

...

Today, crews aren't allowed on the tundra. "If I took a leak out there, I'd get fired," an engineer tells me. "In the winter, if you spill some coffee into the snow, you'd better go get a shovel and dig it up."

...

"I knew a guy who got fired for throwing a rock at a fox," the former ranger tells me, with great exasperation. He wasn't throwing rocks for sport, mind you; apparently almost all of the Arctic foxes are rabid. If you get bitten by a rabid fox with inactive rabies, you get those infamous shots. If you get bitten by a fox with active rabies, the company pays for your funeral. "Every single fox head I've sent to Anchorage for testing has come up positive," he explains. I make a mental note to thank God that I don't have a job that requires the harvesting of rabid fox heads.

Madness.

Thanks to Slublog again for the "Double Vision" pic, too.

UPDATE: Bloomberg agrees with Obama.

posted by Ace at 03:58 PM

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