By Jim Scarantino
Watching Democrats mishandling
Al Qaeda had hoped to provoke us into doing something stupid. Al Qaeda knew it couldn’t defeat us. It needed
As Richard Clarke, the former bin Laden hunter has said, bin Laden had his fingers crossed, wishing Bush into Iraq where Americans would breed another generation of mujahadeen and where American resources would be drained away like the blood slipping from our dead and wounded.
Bush gave bin Laden what Al Qaeda needed. He pulled men and material away from fighting Al Qaeda to settle an old score with Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden is still alive. The Taliban are resurgent.
Osama bin Laden also wanted oil to reach $115 a barrel.
Oil is now flirting with the $140 mark. Wall Street is seriously talking about oil crossing the $200 line. Americans have been told to brace for $7-a-gallon gasoline.
What has been Democrats’ response? Instead of attacking the real threat — the flat global production of oil in the face of soaring global demand — Democrats are settling old scores. They want to punish the top the top five oil companies with a 25 percent “windfall profits tax” on anything the government declares to be “unreasonable.” For the record, the oil industry makes an average 8.8-percent profit. Trial lawyers, Democrats’ deep pocket, collect fees of 33 percent and higher.
Instead of countering the control of our economy by foreign oil powers by increasing our domestic production, Democrats continue an embargo against their own nation. They have placed off limits tens of billions of barrels of known oil reserves, and tens of billions of other barrels believed to be within out borders. These enormous American oil reserves lie in the Democrats’ forbidden zones: the Outer Continental Shelf, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the eastern
The amount of oil Democrats are keeping from their constituents could be 100 billion barrels by some estimates. That’s around $14 trillion dollars worth of oil at present prices. Instead of producing that oil ourselves, Democrats want us to ship our money out of the country to build gleaming cities on the
Bingaman can bring sense to American policy
As chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Bingaman can bring sense to our energy policy. He knows a “windfall profit” tax would drive oil production out of this country. He knows we have to produce more to meet our growing needs as we transition over the next decades to alternative energy. Unlike his Democratic colleagues, he has called for increased deep-sea production. He currently opposes opening ANWR. But Bingaman is no ideologue. He is, above all, a practical man.
It took a pragmatic Richard Nixon, with his anti-communist credentials, to open dialogue with communist
Bingaman must be a better chairman of the Senate Energy Committee than his party is allowing him to be. He should claim the energy debate, not tolerate grandstanding to score temporary election points. He should block Democratic legislation he opposes and turn back the environmental pressure groups who don’t want another drop of oil produced anywhere in the United States.
Osama bin Laden may have his target price now. But unleashing our huge untapped domestic energy potential will deny him the satisfaction of seeing
Scarantino has been recognized as one of the country’s best political columnists by the American Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. His work has been published in more than 50 newspapers. You can contact him at jrscarantino@yahoo.com.