< Part 3 of 4 -see links below >
McCain went down to talk to Big Oil execs. He gave a speech on energy and conservation. Here is the first of two portions.
MCCAIN: We have proven oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States, but a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production, and I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and put our own reserves to use.
All right, all right, all right, drill here, drill now, pay less.
Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.
Folks, this is the issue. It’s not the equivalent of going to the moon, but it is close. This is a goal, a national goal, to become energy independent.
We have the crude. We have the supply. We have it. We just have to go get it. And you don’t get it by sitting around waiting.
You gotta take the first step. In building anything, it takes time. So this is something to rally the people behind. We’ve got the tipping point here, four dollar a gallon gasoline, and it’s going to be great because the Democrats are going to oppose this. They’re going to stand in the way of it. They’re going to be easy to caricature. It will be easy to explain to people. This is not a complicated issue at all. Here’s another McCain qoute.
MCCAIN: He wants a windfall profits tax on oil. To go along with the new taxes he also plans for coal and natural gas. My friends, if the plan sounds familiar, it’s because that was President Jimmy Carter’s big idea, too. And a lot of good it did us.
He’s right about that. It’s accurate, it’s correct, and he’s telling the truth about Obama.
He wants to raise taxes on all these things. The more you tax an activity, the less of that activity you get.
It’s just that simple, proven by years and years and years of human existence.
Here is Obama. This is aboard his campaign plane, he’s trying to paint McCain here as a flip-flopper while he has on his staff the original flip-flopper, John Kerry. Here’s Obama, first of two.
OBAMA: This is yet another reversal by John McCain in terms of his earlier positions, and I think we could set up an interesting debate between John McCain 2000 and John McCain 2008.
Let me help out here, Senator Obama…
If you say no to offshore drilling or drilling in ANWR when oil is at $20 or $30 a barrel, and then you change your mind and say yes to offshore drilling when oil is $140 a barrel, sir, that’s not a flip-flop. That’s just common sense.
It’s like John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, was asked, “Sir, how come you’ve changed your mind?” He said, “Sir, when the facts change, I change my mind.”
The facts have changed here. Oil is no longer $30 a barrel, it’s $140. It’s now profitable to get the shale oil the president was talking about. This is not a flip-flop.
What we have here, the “No-Drill Democrats“ — are on a crash course not to meet our energy needs. They are in a full-court press to cover their rear ends.
This is almost, not quite, but similar to what’s happening in Iraq. Last year at this time and the year before that, the Democrats were openly embracing defeat, saying our troops couldn’t win, they had no chance, we were fighting an unjust war, we need pull out, we need to lose, and Harry Reid was saying we already have lost.
Now we’ve done a 180 and all of a sudden the news out of Iraq is good, but Democrats don’t dare admit it. Same thing’s happening here with the price of oil, energy independence. They continually are on the wrong side of every major issue facing this country and its growth and its future.
So the Democrats are doing everything they can to cover their rears here, not meet our energy needs. As the law of supply and demand jacks up prices, as more voters realize they’re paying the price for liberal special interests, as the polls swing in favor of more drilling, which they are doing, the last refuge of liberals is always to lie and mislead.
They pop up on television, they smile, they say drilling will not lower prices now.
— Wake up people: Nothing will right now.
DEMOCRAT: There’s not one thing we could do to lower prices right now. ANWR alone won’t make us energy independent for more than six months.
–– Nobody ever said that it would. But I’ll tell you what, just this announcement, just the announcement of this initiative, I’m going to be curious to see what goes on in the speculation market, in the futures market.
I’m going to be interested to see how it affects the overall market.
I’ll guarantee you that if the Democrats ever got wise and went along with this and we lift the executive order that prohibits offshore drilling, you watch what happens to the price of oil, once the world knows that the United States of America is going to go get.
They know it, they resent it, and they fear it, as do the Democrats. Democrats don’t like us being this big. They don’t like us being a superpower. They think it creates victims in the rest of the world; we need to be cut down to size.
This issue fits perfectly.
We could probably have a fairly immediate effect on price just by announcing our intention to start drilling. Democrats are saying that there are drilling leases out there. Is it, what, millions of acres?
Well, the leases are too short-term to allow for EPA rules and test drilling. So then they blame it on Big Oil or Big Speculators or Big Bush or Big Cheney.
They blame it on everything but themselves, and their no-drill, no-refine, no-nuclear-plant policies, and that’s exactly who they are: the no-drill, no-refine, no-nuclear-plant Democrats.
Links to series post:
1. OBAMA; the solution to the rising gas prices…
2. Democrats attack failed policies of the past.
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