Why don’t we cut out the middleman and just have Big Oil pay for our Mideast military adventures?
The math is something like this:
- The US consumes about 22MM barrels of light sweet crude daily.
- Back in 2003, oil was selling for around $45/barrel. After two wars in the region (and promise of a third as Big Dick works his magic), it is now $85/barrel. Same stuff, same production, but it costs more.
Rather than attempt to compute the volume-weighted average price of oil over the past 4-5 years, I think we can conservatively estimate an average price increase is at least $20/barrel over the last 4 years.
- That’s a 44% price increase just for fear.
- So what would have represented $1,445 billion in revenues at $45/barrel (22 million barrels, 365 days/year for 4 years) cost instead $2,088 billion, or an extra $642.4 billion.
So let me count the ways. First, we are paying for this wild-eyed military adventurism in diminished international stature, loss of moral compass, and and encroachment on personal freedoms — hey, it’s wartime! Second, we are paying at the pump. Third, we are asked, nay, required to pay for the wars with our taxes and our children’s and grandchildren’s taxes.
That’s triple-dipping, all from the same victims.
And the $642.4 billion looks suspiciously close to what Congress has been asked to rubber stamp to pay for the wars, so it really is just a Shell game (there’s a good pun) to extract money from Americans to pay for a war that backfills piles of windfall profits to the oil companies.
So let’s cut out the middleman. It’s Big Oil’s war. We’ve already given them the money. So let Big Oil pay the costs directly.
And if we’re ever able to reclaim the American judiciary, we’ll sue them to recover the overcharges.
Under the Wahhabi Islamists who hold sway in Saudi Arabia, the Koran doubles as the Saudi constitution and Sharia is its law – stoning for adultery, beheading of witches, lesser penalties or none for wife beating and rape.
The judges – all Muslim clerics – believe their own interpretations represent the will of God.
Sound like anyone we know? (hint: he wears a robe.)
On the U.S. Supreme Court, the loudest of the Wahhabi Wook-Awikes uses his own peculiar construction of the U.S. Constitution as his Koran and believes his interpretations represent the will of the framers – except, of course, when he has to turn activist (Shazaam/Boom) to stop the recount in a presidential election so that the losing Republican can be installed in the White House (Mecca must be kept free of infidels).
But let’s not take facetious liberties with anointed literalists. Though Scalia, like Islamic fundamentalists, wants us all to return to a past that never existed – free of gays (like Iran?), free of uppity minorities, free of people named Ruth Bader Ginsburg – in truth, there is a difference between Sharia and Scalia. The Saudis are actually trying to reform their court system.
They’re reducing the power of their own right-wing justices – the Judiciary Council, which is packed with the most extreme reactionaries in the whole reactionary kingdom.
Those guys will be reassigned to administrative work, and a new Supreme Court will be appointed. Who might turn up on that body remains to be seen, but we’d be happy to help. We have four or five Wahhabi Wook-Awikes we’d love to trade, say, for a low draft choice or a barrel of oil apiece.
It’s time for Hollywood to come up with a Scalia movie starring Danny DeVito.
At hearings in Albany, tough-on-terrorism Republican state senator Vincent Leibell derided Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to register illegal immigrants for driver’s licenses. Grilling DMV commissioner David Swarts, he growled, “Why, under that proposal, Osama bin Laden could obtain a driver’s license in New York!”
Said Swarts, “At least we’d know where he is.”
Could Laura Bush be furtively grooming herself?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Chimpanzees groom each other, but Laura’s chimp has been too busy covering his tracks and posing for imaginary sculptors to worry about Laura’s future.
For all his foibles, Bill Clinton made room in the White House for Hillary to build her credentials, and then he was ready to pitch in and campaign when it was her turn to be president.
As glory-hog in chief, W has no time for that. So if Laura wants to follow Hillary as president (you know – Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, Bush…), she has to fatten up her resume on her own. This week she’s in the Middle East, supposedly on women’s health issues, but she’s also calling on the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia and high officials in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In September, she invited female members of the White House press corps to lunch, a tour of renovations, and a huddle on No Child Left Behind and why it’s all right that the Republicans are leaving so many children behind. She’s also taken up the issue of Myanmar — where finger-pointing is so much easier than in Iraq — threw a formal dinner for the queen of England, and went to Egypt to praise the government on its support of democratic principles (viable candidates have to display a sense of humor).
Friends and Washington reporters say it’s ridiculous to think that Laura would ever seek the presidency, but these are the same people who couldn’t see how ridiculous her husband was.
Fair is fair. After the next Clinton, it’s the Bushes’ turn, and we certainly don’t want Jeb to come in and screw up the country so badly that Chelsey won’t be able to fix it.
I guess he’s rich, but poor Dan Rather.
Demoted, shoved aside, reviled by a hundred pontificating editorialists and columnists – gatekeepers of the fourth estate who took time out from toadying to Karl Rove and helping Bush/Cheney lie repeatedly and catastrophically to the American people – to condemn Dan for failing to make absolutely certain that his producers had made absolutely certain about the authenticity of a couple of documents.
None of the posturing pontificators even suggested that the documents did not exist – just that these were not the originals, which Bush and family and friends and politically sensitive commanders had taken pains to destroy. Meantime, a bloody war had been launched by the draft dodgers based on forged documents and twisted intelligence, aided and abetted by a docile, largely uncritical press corps.
No one seriously maintained that the story Dan reported was not true. Nor that the eye-witnesses to Bush’s draft evasion and kissing off Air National Guard duties were less than credible.
Clearly, the entire story was true.
But what has truth got to do with high-minded principles of journalism such as lab-testing documents and kissing ass to make sure you get access to interviews with high officials whom you know for a fact are cynically using you to spread more lies to readers or viewers who haven’t yet noticed that you are not to be trusted.
Poor Dan. He told the truth, and he lost his job — while many of lhis hypocritical colleagues were losing their souls.
It’s hard to see how he can win his $70 million suit, but I hope he wins it at least for a dollar, or that it gets far enough to get Bush on the stand and cross-examine him on every aspect of his sorry history that his family has thus far managed to hush up.
It could happen. The suit could easily go on until Bush leaves office and loses some of the stonewalling powers now baffling Congress.
Let’s help Bush flesh out his legacy, adding his early signs of corruption to the high crimes and misdemeanors for which historians will mainly remember him, even as they honor Dan Rather for being one of very few journalists who in those dark times were willing, despite the risks, to deal in realities.
Take a minute to read the letters to the editor in today’s New York Times.
Inured as the public has become to scandal during a presidency that seems to consist of nothing BUT, this past week seems to have pushed people over the brink.
I quote the first letter in full below, but read through the rest of them if you can. It’s the first time I’ve seen the NYT looking like the comments section of a DailyKos diary.
“Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations” (front page, Oct. 4) and “Bush Vetoes Health Bill Privately, Without Fanfare” (news article, Oct. 4) make me feel sick and desperate about what this president has done, and continues to do, to our once-proud country in only seven years. Could he have done more to debase us if he had set out purposely to destroy us, our economy, our moral values and our dignity?
To him and to his minions who tar their critics as America-haters, I borrow Paul Robeson’s words from another bleak age: “You are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
Monica Mori
Chicago, Oct. 4, 2007
Looks like Home Depot had better stock up on pitchforks…
Don’t tell anyone, but we have a private army.
It’s called Whitewater. Its assault troops train in the rapids of the upper Youghiogheny, where Blackwater fears to tread water.
Whitewater accepts no contracts from pantywaist draft dodgers masquerading as top government officials whose only combat experience has consisted of shooting unarmed ducks – who even in those romper-room fantasy wars cover themselves with camouflage and hide.
Whitewater sails into troubled waters protected by nothing more than a rubber raft. Once global warming raises the ocean levels, there will be nobody in the halls of Congress except Whitewater rafters, and then it will be time to get the people’s business done.
If there are still any Bush vetoes or signing statements floating around in the scum, they’ll be over-ridden, but not before they’re drowned.
A single squad of Whitewater warriors will be enough to take over the Supreme Court. I think they’ll have room in their rafts to save only four of the justices, but that should be enough.
