{"id":3387,"date":"2008-06-19T07:48:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-19T13:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/2008\/06\/bingaman-goes-to-anwr\/"},"modified":"2008-06-19T07:48:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-19T13:48:00","slug":"bingaman-goes-to-anwr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2008\/06\/bingaman-goes-to-anwr\/","title":{"rendered":"Bingaman goes to ANWR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By Jim Scarantino<\/span> <\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Watching Democrats mishandling America<\/st1:country-region>\u2019s energy crisis feels like 2002: There we were fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan<\/st1:country-region><\/st1:place>. They had attacked us with hijacked planes. They wanted to upgrade from flying coach to detonating nuclear weapons in American cities.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Al Qaeda had hoped to provoke us into doing something stupid. Al Qaeda knew it couldn\u2019t defeat us. It needed America<\/st1:country-region><\/st1:place> to defeat itself by committing a colossal strategic blunder.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

As Richard Clarke<\/a>, the former bin Laden<\/a> hunter has said, bin Laden had his fingers crossed, wishing Bush<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

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<\/a>, and bin Laden is still alive. The Taliban are resurgent. America<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> has 4,000 dead, tens of thousands wounded, and 600,000 suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or traumatic brain injury. We\u2019ve lost our leadership position in the world. We\u2019re looking at a $3 trillion tab for war with no end in sight.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Osama bin Laden also wanted oil to reach $115 a barrel.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

What has been Democrats\u2019 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 \u201cwindfall profits tax\u201d on anything the government declares to be \u201cunreasonable.\u201d For the record, the oil industry makes an average 8.8-percent profit. Trial lawyers, Democrats\u2019 deep pocket, collect fees of 33 percent and higher. <\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

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\u2019 forbidden zones: the Outer Continental Shelf, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the eastern Gulf of Mexico<\/st1:place> and certain other federal lands.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

The amount of oil Democrats are keeping from their constituents could be 100 billion barrels by some estimates. That\u2019s 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 Arabian Peninsula<\/st1:place>. That\u2019s $14 trillion that won\u2019t be generated in this country, that won\u2019t stimulate our injured economy and won\u2019t create American jobs. And we\u2019ll likely have to borrow that $14 trillion from the Chinese. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Bingaman can bring sense to American policy<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

New Mexico<\/st1:state>\u2019s Sen. Jeff Bingaman<\/a> couldn\u2019t stop the Iraq<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> war himself. A Democratic Senate lost its head when it gave Bush the green light to do whatever he wanted in Iraq<\/st1:country-region><\/st1:place>. Bingaman was one of the few courageous and wise senators to vote against giving bin Laden that gift. Unfortunately, Bingaman lacked any more leverage than the wisdom of his softly spoken, unheeded words.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources<\/a>, Bingaman can bring sense to our energy policy. He knows a \u201cwindfall profit\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

It took a pragmatic Richard Nixon<\/a>, with his anti-communist credentials, to open dialogue with communist China<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>. It may take Bingaman, a Democrat with a solid environmental record, to push aside the rhetoric and ignorance preventing us from producing desperately needed energy. <\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

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\u2019t want another drop of oil produced anywhere in the United States.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Osama bin Laden may have his target price now. But unleashing our huge untapped domestic energy potential will deny him the satisfaction of seeing America<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> brought to its knees by its own stupidity.<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Scarantino<\/a> has been recognized as one of the country\u2019s best political columnists by the American Association of Alternative Newsweeklies<\/a>. His work has been published in more than 50 newspapers. You can contact him at jrscarantino@yahoo.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jim Scarantino Watching Democrats mishandling America\u2019s energy crisis feels like 2002: There we were fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. They had attacked us with hijacked planes. They wanted to upgrade from flying coach to detonating nuclear weapons in American cities. Al Qaeda had hoped to provoke us into doing something stupid. Al Qaeda knew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scarantino-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}