Dorkus Malorkus

The Gadflyer: Fly Trap:
How now GOP leaders that Bush is tapping the Strategic Petro Reserve?
Thomas F. Schaller (1:52PM) link

Hmmm….Failed oilman, supposed free-marketeer and national security-first President George W. Bush is going to start tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Must be because of some national security threat to our pipelines, right?

Wrong. Gas prices are high and already-nervous Republicans are getting more nervous that gas prices will exacerbate their already difficult electoral prospects this November.

Let’s review what major national Republicans were saying when Bill Clinton did the same thing in September 2000:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert deemed it “a political bandaid 46 days before the election” and referred to the Clinton Administration’s energy policy as “risky.”
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, was very matter-of-fact: “This is bad public policy, plain and simple. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists to be used in states of national emergency, not at the whim of political debates or economic fluctuations. Congressional hearings have demonstrated the administration’s prior knowledge of the coming oil price spikes, and yet they stood by and allowed them to happen.”
Then-Senator and now Alaska governor Frank Murkowski chimed in to remind the country that “the Reserve was established to provide oil to the nation in the case of a severe supply disruption, not to lower market prices when politics demand.”
Republican Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma declared: “The emergency oil is for a severe shortage and not to help a candidate seven weeks before the election.”
I look forward to the never-hypocritical Republicans shouting about how Bush’s risky energy policy is bad public policy (plain and simple!), and that it should not be done when politics demand that frightened Republican candidates want relief just seven months before they stand for re-election.

I’m holding my breath.

Holy shit…. I said nearly the SAME thing to my wife this morning.  And ended it w/ “I’ll hold my breath.”