Irony of ironies, it looks like it’s going to be oil itself that gives that final little nudge to topple a tottering former oilman.
Poor guy. On the one hand, the situation is really beyond his control. On the other, it’s almost all his doing – or perhaps I should say “non-doing.”
Conservation? We don’t need no stinking conservation! Tax breaks for my boys in the oil bidness! Open the refuges! Who cares about the environment! Full drilling ahead! Hybrid cars? Alternative fuels? Nah, we’re good.
What? We’re not? Well, dang. How’d that happen?
How “it” happened is just another example of what an abysmal failure the Bush administration has been. As with many other crises during W’s tenure, this one happened gradually, then all at once.
It happened, first of all, when W let the fox into the henhouse by allowing the oil boys to “help” in drafting our national energy policy. Well, but he had Cheney (heh, heh) making sure things were above board.
Of course he did.
Here’s a fistful of tax breaks, incentives and environmental relaxations – go drill your hearts out. Yeah, sure, the Arctic, too.
Now, shoo! Well, hell, oil boys will be oil boys. Watcha gonna do?
Then came Iraq. Soon as we got hold of Saddam and fixed things up right, American-style, whoo-ee, the oil would just gush into our Treasury to pay for the war. Uh, maybe not. Turns out that we can hardly get the country under control with those insurgents running around causing mayhem. Guess we didn’t see that one coming. Our bad.
As for oil, we’ve hardly seen a drop of it, though we’re paying through the nose.
John Q. American: How many billions does it take to make an Iraqi oilfield operational?
Bush: Lower taxes.
(Yeah, I don’t get it, either.)
Then, when we weren’t watching, the Chinese took the field, and they’ve got a very big team. Who’d have thought their march to modernization would involve oil? Guess we didn’t see that one coming, either.
And the Indians. And the Southeast Asians. All of a sudden, everyone wants oil. Darnedest thing, ’cause 10 years ago it was mainly us hogging it. We were the undisputed champs. It really stinks when other countries want the trophy you’ve had all your life.
OK, so then W got religion, briefly, calculatedly, hypocritically, and confessed before the people our sin of addiction. Made some visits, shook some hands, nodded a lot, posed for photos, made some speeches, went back to Washington, practiced saying “alternative.” Restored some funding he’d slashed.
Just a little. Not too much. Don’t want to cause panic, or do anything drastic, like tax the oil companies on their gargantuan profits to fund alternative-fuels research and development. Wouldn’t be prudent. Not at this juncture. Learned that from Dad.
Now comes Iran, with Russia and China cozying up. That’s a real axis of oil, isn’t it? Say, they weren’t real happy about Iraq, come to think about it.
They wouldn’t use that against us, would they? I really hate it when we alienate people who have oil or make most of our stuff. Really messes up the old foreign policy and trade and such.
It would definitely help if we didn’t need oil so much, you know, if we could wean ourselves off our giant cars and develop efficient alternative fuels that we could produce and build more clean mass transit and walk and bike more and stop planning communities around the car and make conscious choices to conserve and – wonder of wonders – all the while these steps would actually help to disarm those who threaten us with the oil card.
Aw, who am I kidding? That would all take a long time, and I tend to lose interest in things that, well, you know.
Besides, Cheney would never let me.
Mark Moe (brktrt_80231@yahoo. com) is a retired English teacher.
