Magnificent: Patterico’s Pummeling of LA Times’ Defense of Obama & Skyrocketing Gas Prices
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on February 25, 2012
Memory Lane: Presidential candidate Barack Obama spoke out in Indianapolis in April 2008 against Pres. Bush's rising gas prices - price of regular gas that day, shown here on Joe's Junction sign, was $3.55 a gallon. This week, gas has skyrocketed to $5.00 and $6.00 a gallon in a number of major US cities
Nail, meet hammer. A really BIG hammer.
Blogger Patterico’s keen, fact-based post that pounds to a messy pulp an “absurd L.A. Times editorial about the joys of higher gas prices” is brilliant, acerbic, spot-on, and eye-opening.
A must-must-read today — I’ve extracted a portion below, but beeline over to Patterico’s Pontifications for the entire breathtaking post.
L.A. Times Editors: Are You Upset Gas Costs So Much? Ride a Moped, Idiot! — the first two paragraphs here are from the liberal LA Times op-ed, and what follows is some get-down righteous fisking:
Prices at the pump have been rising for the last five weeks, hitting an average in California of $4.035 for a gallon of regular on Monday, a 5.2% jump over the previous week. This is more than just an inconvenience: If the spike continues, it could derail the nation’s economic recovery. It is also giving rise, as such things always do, to conspiracy theories by people of all political persuasions — most of which aren’t worth the carbon dioxide emitted in their utterance.
On the right, it’s popular to blame President Obama. His “green” energy policies, according to this theory, are the reason it’s costing $80 a pop to fill the tanks of our Ford Explorers; if he would only drill, baby, drill in more places, we could restore America’s God-given right to cheap gas. The fact that this makes no sense hardly slows the chatter on talk radio or the rhetoric from GOP presidential candidates such as Rick Santorum, who repeated this canard Monday. The complaints are enough to make one wonder whom Republicans blamed when similar price spikes happened during the presidency of former oil executive George W. Bush. In any case, it takes decades from the time a new oil permit is approved before a field is producing reliable amounts of oil, meaning that even if the wildest dreams of oil executives to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other protected places were granted today, it wouldn’t have a noticeable impact on gas prices until around 2030.
This is always what you hear whenever domestic production is proposed. It would only provide oil for x number of days, and if we started drilling today, we wouldn’t see results until year y.
It’s a genius argument, isn’t it? It’s a good reason why you shouldn’t save for retirement! Why, if you’re 40 today, and you want to retire at 60, you’re not going to see any benefits until 2032! So why bother?
They’ll still be making that argument in 2030, you know.
But I think the best example of what utter crap that argument is, is the fact that the debate over whether to drill in ANWR has been going on since 1977. So let’s do the math, and figure out when we would have seen benefits if we had started drilling when the idea first came to Congress’s attention. If it’s 2012 now, and we wouldn’t see a reduction in gas prices until 2030, that means that it would take 18 years to see that benefit. So you add 18 to 1977, and, let’s see [commence arithmetical mumbling, 8 and 7, that's 5, carry the 1, 2 and 7 is 9, mumble mumble . . .] — it looks like we would have been seeing the benefits since 1995. Seventeen years ago.
Remember when gas averaged less than $2.00 a gallon? Bittersweet memories of better days long ago in America.
Not so long ago. That price — either $1.78 or $1.87 per gallon, depending on your source — was the approximate average of gasoline on the day of the Vacationer in Chief’s inauguration in January 2009.
Reminder — when gas prices were soaring in America in April 2011, Obama’s EPA goons killed Shell Oil’s drilling in remote, oil-rich regions of Alaska, and Obama pleaded for the world’s oil production to increase. Snort.
From Doug Ross Journal:
The accompanying map depicts “The No Zone.” This is the region surrounding the United States in which Democrats have forbidden oil exploration. Take, for example, ANWR. The Alaskan wildlife refuge is an immense property. To put it into its proper scale, if ANWR was the size of a football field, the requested oil exploration area is the size of a postage stamp.
Democrats' 'No Zone' for oil exploration
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