RUSH: Let’s not forget John Dingell, March 23rd, 2010, in Detroit.
DINGELL: Paul W. (Smith), we’re not ready to be doing it, but let me remind you, this has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.
RUSH: To control the people. And a great illustration of controlling the people is this phony promise of offshore oil drilling. It is a feint, it is a head fake. Here’s all you need to know: ‘The Los Angeles Times, citing administration officials, summed up the four biggest elements of the plan: Eventually open two-thirds of the eastern Gulf’s oil and gas resources for drilling. Proceed with drilling off Virginia, provided the project clears environmental and military reviews.’ Each one of these things has an out. ‘Study the viability of drilling off the mid- and southern Atlantic coasts. Study the viability of drilling in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas — areas hotly defended by environmentalists.’ We know where there is oil and none of that area is being drilled, none of it. ANWR, lots of oil. Not being drilled there.
This is a head fake. This is designed to show Obama as a moderate guy, position him as a moderate in favor of developing America’s natural resources. It’s an attempt to draw RINOs into a cap and tax agreement and it’s no accident that Obama is going to Maine today to sell the health care bill. Why sell the health care bill? Why after the fact? What’s the big deal? Well, very simple. Two names: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. You go up there and you attempt to get them to fall in line on his other stuff. I think Obama’s probably going into their backyard to show them how he can hurt them. He wants to pick ’em off for other stuff to show he is bipartisan. Remember, folks, independents — a little politics here — independents are leaving Obama in droves. The congressional generic ballot again, the survey is out, and Republicans are over the top big in this, and it’s only happened three times in history that the Republicans have won the generic ballot. It’s huge, the portend for the November elections.
So this offshore drilling, this is designed to mollify swing voters by misleading them again. I think it’s a test of political instinct, a test for the hopelessly gullible. Anybody upon hearing this saying, ‘Hey, maybe we misjudged the president, gotta give him credit out there what he does something right.’ Now, if that’s you, you have flunked. The people fooled by this sophistry will be duped again when we get closer to November. Look, Obama is a radical leftist. He still wants cap and trade. They’re going to accelerate the new CAFE standards from 2020 to 2016 which means that corporate fleets must average 35 miles a gallon. All this talk about reducing dependence on foreign oil, if you really wanted to do it there’s all kinds of oil in places we know it to exist, including North Dakota. Is that where the big shale oil deposit is? This is just temporary. It’s like the nuclear plants. He’s not going to do it, and he’s not going to drill. He’s not going to have any new nuclear plants. All of this is designed to counter the allegations by people like me and other critics that Obama is a radical leftist, period.
He has been in office over a year. He has not done a thing, not one thing to make this country more prosperous. Why would anybody think that he’s interested in doing that now? Everything is designed to grow government. Everything is designed to weaken the private sector and fool the gullible, the brilliant and ever reasonable independents and moderates among us. And that’s the thing that you have to remember. Now, here’s a quote, statement from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. They put a press release out on this. ‘Most of Alaska, all of the Pacific coast, and other areas that could yield affordable energy for American consumers are still closed off from any development. Rather than a painful compromise, this is therefore actually a step back from what the American people thought had been achieved in 2008. ‘When gas reached four dollars a gallon, the American people were shocked to discover that most of our domestic oil reserves were locked up by the federal government. They demanded change,’ said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Energy Policy Myron Ebell. In 2008, President George W. Bush revoked his father’s executive order barring new offshore energy development and the Department of the Interior prepared a five year offshore leasing plan. The Democratic Congress co-operated by dropping the long-time moratorium which banned offshore oil production everywhere except in the western Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean off Alaska.’
Now, remember when they caved on this, I’ll never forget it, four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, and they caved on this, and right after they caved on it there were a lot of Democrats running around saying, ‘We really didn’t mean to do this. We didn’t want to do this and we’re going to put this back. We’re going to bring this moratorium back as soon as we can.’ ‘The Obama administration, however, suspended the Interior plan and delayed a planned lease auction scheduled for 2011. It is now proposing a new plan that is much more limited.’ So they have put the moratorium back on and they’ve opened it up in these other areas again with the words ‘study, eventually, hopefully, and maybe.’ This is Myron Ebell, the Director of Energy Policy at Competitive Enterprise Institute: ‘Anyone who sees this as a step in the right direction should remember that President Obama still supports energy-rationing policies to address global warming –‘ Oh, by the way, Arctic sea ice traditionally starts melting about this time of year, naturally. It is still freezing. Arctic sea ice is expanding and it is not melting.
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RUSH: Back to Myron Ebell’s statement here: ‘Anyone who sees this as a step in the right direction should remember that President Obama still supports energy-rationing policies to address global warming that would cause electricity prices to, in his own words, ‘necessarily skyrocket’ and would require gas prices of at least seven dollars a gallon according to a recent Harvard study.’ I remember reporting that seven dollars a gallon Harvard study.
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RUSH: Let’s go to Casper, Wyoming. Samuel, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How you doing, brother?
RUSH: Very well. Thank you.
CALLER: Fantastic. Well, like you said, I’m in Wyoming, so we’re not afraid we’re going to tip over and capsize at any point. I called about the offshore drilling —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — that Obama was talking about. It’s a bit of a misnomer. Two weeks ago they canceled 38,000 federal drilling leases in eastern Montana.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah.
CALLER: Those are probably on the Bakken Formation. Are you familiar with the Bakken Formation?
RUSH: Yes, very well aware of that.
CALLER: Okay, 1.7 trillion in oil, 155% of what’s in Yemen. If we can get 10% of it. That’s just 10%. They spend a lot of time talking about offshore drilling and none of their time talking about drilling inland.
RUSH: That’s exactly right.
CALLER: We have enough oil in the Bakken Formation if we can recover just 10% of it for export.
RUSH: Well, exactly. We’ve got oil at Prudhoe Bay. We’ve got oil at ANWR. All of the places where we know oil exists he’s not drilling. The most recent data for the areas that Obama has opened up — by the way, folks, none of this is going to happen if Congress doesn’t vote for it. He could issue an executive order but he won’t on this, Congress has to approve this, they have to vote for it. Do you think the environmentalist lobby is going to let him get away with this? He knows full well they won’t, same thing with all the time it will take of going through the process of getting a nuclear power plant through permits and certification. The most recent data we have on some of these areas that he’s opened up for possible drilling is 30 years old. We’re not even sure what we’re going for in these areas. The whole thing is a giant scam.
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RUSH: Do you remember this story? This is from August 5th of 2009. We reported it on this program. ‘US ready to finance oil drilling in Brazil.’ Up to $10 billion in loans to finance the development of massive hydrocarbon reserves off Brazil’s coast, and this also was in league with George Soros. This was not to study. They were not exploring. They were not testing. This was to drill. So we’re happy to help other nations do this, and he just performs tricks on the American people where ‘drill, baby, drill’ is concerned.
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RUSH: Pittsburgh, Jeff, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Welcome back.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: This oil exploration that Obama’s doing, I think we can all deem that as BS. But the nuclear part of it, strangely enough in the Sports Illustrated from 1979, there’s a full-page ad having all industrialized countries going nuclear and only America has been slow to decide its energy future. I don’t think we went too much further then. I think we’re getting ourselves behind the eight ball, so to speak.
RUSH: Oh, we’ve been behind the eight ball for a long time. One movie shut down the nuclear industry in this company, The China Syndrome.
CALLER: China Syndrome, yeah.
RUSH: Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, shut it down, Michael Douglas, was he in that? Jane Fonda, that’s all you need to know. That one movie shut us down. When you say we’re behind the eight bail, we’ve been behind the eight ball on energy I don’t know for how long. I mean all of this moratorium on offshore drilling, moratorium on providing our own energy, and oil being portrayed as the worst scum of the earth that’s destroying the planet, when oil, the internal combustion engine, all of the technology resulting has lead to the most productive, enhanced lifestyle humanity has ever known around the world, not just here. And yet oil is being demonized. I mean these windmills, they freeze up, they don’t run when there’s not enough wind and you can’t make wind, and they’re not efficient anyway. The left has just gotten hold of all of this, and their desire is to cut this country down to size. They don’t like our superpower status. They don’t like it because they think it’s not fair that we should have so much and the rest of the world should have so little. They think we’ve stolen it from the rest of the world. They don’t understand capitalism, they hate it. They don’t understand the concept of productivity. All they understand is the redistribution of wealth. But they resent the creation of it. And you can’t redistribute what you don’t have. And we don’t have what we are redistributing now. We are printing it, we are borrowing it, and we’re running up a debt that at some point’s going to come due. The situation is dire. We are a great nation at risk in a dangerous world. The fact of the matter is that the biggest threat we now face is internal, our own radical left.