Jake Tapper says this morning [1]that the White House has given a go ahead to offshore drilling.
On Wednesday morning at Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility in Washington, DC, President Obama will announce that his administration will allow the lease sale to go forward for oil and gas exploration 50 miles off of the Virginia coast — the first new sales of offshore oil and gas in the Atlantic in more than two decades.
The howling from the left is predictable. At the Huff and Puff for example: [2]
“Its like a kick in the face” says Jonathan Ruiz of Florida International University. Jonathan campaigned for Obama for fourteen months, and now he’s livid about today’s announcement by the administration to open half the east coast to offshore drilling.
“I was born near Florida’s Emerald Gulf Coast.” says Graham Penniman of University of Central Florida. “The memories that I have on those beaches brings me so much joy, that every night I fall asleep thinking about the moons reflection across the water. To imagine my beach any other way destroys my heart.”
…
Youth, the millennial generation so inspired by Obama to vote in record numbers, have the most to lose from the expansion of drilling. Even some coastal governors and senators will be angry about the announcement because of the small amount of oil and huge environmental risks.
This is of course, utter nonsense, driven into what laughingly passes for their brains by Al Gore and others.
[3]Offshore drilling; let's get going
And as usual the objections don’t make sense in a capitalist society….
Lets really listen to Megan Maloney at the University of Central Florida when she says “As a young America citizen I am fearful for my future because of Obama’s decision of pursuing more offshore drilling off our coasts.” And Keziyah Lewis of Florida State University points to the DOE report [4] on the cost of actually extracting that energy to say “obviously offshore oil drilling just doesn’t make sense when you compare the cost of infrastructure, research, etc, to the amount of fuel that is attainable, it’s like throwing money down the toilet.”
The possibility of the Department of Energy report being politically motivated, apparently escapes Lewis, apparently because the language in the report doesn’t run afoul of liberal sensitivities. (Would Lewis take the report on face value if it did?)
There’s one other thing however, that escapes Lewis… that should be intrinsically obvious to anyone who actually understands and approves of capitalism; (And such are hard to find among the hard core Obama supporters)… No private enterprise is going to go through all the government hoops and the initial expense involved unless they are damn sure they’re going to get a return on their investments of time and money etc. That’s the point that came up during the discussion about ANWR, and the number of leases that went undrilled. a claim was that such drilling wasn’t needed, and the evidence was that there were a number of leases which went unused. Which, of course, ignores the idea that research proves there wasn’t oil under there to bring up in the first place. Nobody’s (Except a liberal) is going to invest without a good shot at a return on that investment.
In all likelihood, the amount of drilling a allowed to buy this plan of Obama’s, will be too little. Then again, the next president will undoubtedly be less of a hard core socialist, and thereby more realistic about things, and can deal with that issue by opening the taps.
In the meantime, however, what we have on our hands is a tacit admission from the president of the United States that he lied to the people while a candidate for the office. You may recall, that he gave John McCain a rather hard time over his comments about domestic drilling [5]. Now, suddenly, he’s doing exactly what he complained about.
In my Pajamas Media article of a little over a year ago [6], I suggested that Obama would be forced to change his rhetoric as regards terrorism and in the end will gravitate toward exactly the policy that was laid out by President Bush and his administration.
I dare to suggest that Mr. Bush is going to be vindicated over the next four years by President Obama himself. Vindicated not in rhetoric, since left-wing rhetoric is always and forever vitriolic against any successful Republican. No, Bush will be vindicated thanks to the policies sure to be adopted by Mr. Obama and the Democrat-run Senate, House, and State Dept.
I make this assessment based on the proposition that President Obama is a pragmatist at heart. He goes with what works to keep himself in power. One cannot, after all, be such an astute manager of his own spectacle without being in large part a pragmatist.
If we accept the lessons of history, in this case the Clinton administration, Democrats have learned how to change political reality. They have learned how to alter the perception they are on the run from an unruly mob, into one that suggests what is really going on is that there is a parade — one that they are leading. Finding in their pragmatism something that works and that someone else has offered, and then getting out in front of it as if it was their plan to begin with. This has been their big talent for the last 20 years or so.
Indeed, it is Obama who apparently is doing the most in terms of recognizing (the far left’s bleeding anti-Bush vitriol notwithstanding) that Mr. Bush didn’t do that bad of a job after all. He’s adopting the vast majority of his anti-terrorism and economic policies (i.e., the bailout plans)
Apparently, this trend has been taken with energy, as well. It’s been said, and rightly, that all Obama’s promises have expiration dates. Clearly that is true here. But here’s the reason, in this case is that his enviro-whackjob zeal ran headlong into reality… and reality won, as it always does. The fact of the matter is, that Obama’s facing the reality that economic recovery isn’t possible without the energy to do it with… exactly as I suggested he would when it was Candidate Obama.
That said, I will guarantee you the one thing you will not see among the left, is the admission that what Obama is doing here is vindicating the Republican agenda…. and he’s doing exactly that.
And I suppose and expect that’s was really got the left in an uproar of this morning.