Chris Matthews on DNCTV and his show, Hardball.

MATTHEWS: I don’t understand why the Democratic Party doesn’t do to the Republicans what the Republicans did to the Democrats back in 1980 when we had a fuel crisis. You got gasoline going to five bucks a gallon. Everybody knows that. It could be at six by November. Why don’t they blame it all on Halliburton, the oil industry, the Republicans in bed with the oil industry?

That’s incredible! Where the hell has he been? Chris, what do you think the Democrats have been doing?

Halliburton has been blamed for everything since we went to Iraq. The Senate Democrats are trying to pass a windfall profits tax today on the floor of the Senate against the oil companies. The Democrats have been blaming Bush and his oil buddies for all kinds of horrible things for six or seven years.

From The Politico:

“The AFL-CIO is going to send members to gas stations in two dozen cities this week to focus attention on soaring prices and to attack President Bush and John McCain for being beholden to Big Oil.”

Now, the thing about this is that the AFL-CIO knows full well that it is the leftists in this country who are hurting supply and capacity. It is the leftists in this country who are doing everything they can to see to it that there’s no more domestic oil production taking place in this country.

Roy Spencer:

There have been protests filed against further oil and gas lease sales on government property. While there is an increasing public realization that we need to be drilling more and drilling now here at home, the environmentalists have begun the fight to stop future oil and gas lease sales by the US Bureau of Land Management.

These are leftists! These are people who want to shut down this country’s economy.

They know full well that there is a building public mood to start drilling here and drilling now, to increase supply and reduce our dependence on foreign suppliers.

And so what are they doing? They’re taking preemptive action to try to intimidate via protest the Bureau of Land Management from selling any further leases or awarding any further leases on government land.

It’s not a lawsuit that they have filed yet. It is a protest. And here’s a quote from it.

“This protest is predicated on the Bureau of Land Management’s failure to address global warming and climate change.”

So while Chris Matthews wonders what the hell the Democrats are doing, why aren’t they blaming the Republicans.

Chris, your own leftists — are taking every step they can to shut down any increase in domestic supplies of energy.

Now, this specific protest, is in reference to recent New Mexico lease sales, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of new efforts to stop or to greatly slow through legal maneuvering future leases.

You’ve seen the polls, the public sentiment on drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf and up in ANWR and in Montana, the Bakken Formation and expanding that. There is increasing public sentiment to do this and to do it now.

And the leftists, who are doing their best to shut this country down, are fully aware of it, and they’re using their time-honored and true techniques. They’re simply intimidating federal agencies and bureaucracies, and they may not have to intimidate them much because like-minded fellow travelers probably are working in some of these agencies, like US Fish and Wildlife Service, the EPA.

This is what the leftists have done. Over the years they have succeeded in having like-minded fellow travelers appointed to bureaucrat positions by people like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and in some cases even George Bush who was trying to forge a new tone with the Democrats to try to end all this partisanship.

So they’re there, and they can’t be gotten rid of.

The point is, while all these Democrats are on television, the Media types are worried to death that their party is dropping the ball; the exact thing they want to happen is not only happening, it has been happening for years; in some cases decades.