Hillary Clinton, at a press conference on oil prices and the like, embarrassed herself. —-

HILLARY: When I’m president, we will finally get tough with OPEC. You know, OPEC is a cartel. It’s basically a monopoly of the 13 biggest oil producing nations. They get together in a room a couple of times a year, they decide how much oil they will produce and what the price will be. If you did that in the United States, if every veneer company did that, you’d be violating the law, because you can’t be fixing prices, and you can’t be determining supply. It’s supposed to be a free market. But we don’t have anything like a free market when it comes to oil.

Gee, this is almost as bad as what Chuck Schumer said. Remember the ’04 presidential campaign, John Kerry, demanding Bush go talk to OPEC, get them to lower prices, raise production, or do something.

Mrs. Clinton says that there’s price fixing going on in OPEC. OPEC doesn’t control all the oil, Mrs. Clinton. Sure OPEC does what they can to keep the price up, but they are as subject to the market as anybody else is.

When was the last time Mrs. Clinton cared about a free market anyway? She’s going to get tough with OPEC. What’s she going to threaten these guys with?

It’s the non-OPEC companies that are coming up short here, the Norways, the Mexicos, the Venezuelas, they’re the ones coming up short because of nationalization of their supplies.

You know, I just marvel. This woman has no clue, either, about how oil works, the market, pricing.

This is another portion of her remarks.

HILLARY: I’ll put a government watchdog back in charge of our energy markets. Right now they are unregulated. That alone could drop —

Oh my goodness… how stupid was that last comment?

HILLARY: — the price $20 a barrel —

Unregulated?

HILLARY: — and they’ll crack down on price gouging and any other kind of wholesale manipulation, in order to ensure that it’s all on the up and up. We need to know what the price is in order to understand how we’re gonna pay for it. But we sure shouldn’t be guessing whether what we’re paying has nothing to do with the real price.

This is absurd. This is ignorant. This is profoundly ignorant, folks.

Put a government watchdog back in charge of our energy markets, right now they’re unregulated? Unregulated? How about all the different formulations of gasoline we have to have for different geographical areas of the country, just to name one set of regulations? How about the regulations where they cannot drill?

A government official in charge of the market?

We’re going to have to change your name, Hugo Rodham Chavez. We have to know what the price is in order to understand how we’re going to pay for it?

We know what the price is.

God help us all.