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Daniel Henninger has thoughts on the country that won’t drill for oil.
Charles de Gaulle once wrote off the nation of Brazil in six words: “Brazil is not a serious country.” How much time is left before someone says the same of the United States?
…At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.
But not us. We won’t drill.
…We live in a world in which Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez use their vast oil and gas reserves as instruments of state power. Here, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid use their control of Congress to spend a week debating a “climate-change” bill. This they did fresh off their subsidized (and bipartisan) ethanol fiasco.
One may assume that Mr. Putin and the Chinese have noticed the policy obsessions of our political class. While other nations use their oil reserves to attain world status, we give ours up. Why shouldn’t they conclude that, long term, these people can be taken? Nikita Khrushchev said, “We will bury you.” Forget that. We’ll do it ourselves.
Fred Barnes too.
For years now, John McCain has warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He’s been loud and relentless on the subject–and wise. “It’s a national security issue,” he declared last week at a town hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that “do not like us very much,” he noted. That was McCain’s understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort.
So you’d think McCain would favor an unbridled effort to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. But he doesn’t. There’s an intellectual and political hole in McCain’s position, a lack of coherence that hurts both his presidential campaign and that of Republican congressional candidates.
Republicans have seized on public anger over $4 per gallon gasoline and are calling for domestic oil production in federal lands and offshore areas now closed to exploration and drilling. Since polls show the public agrees with them, Republicans believe “drilling”–the one-word capsulation of the issue–is their strongest political talking point in 2008. Indeed, it may be their only good domestic issue.
But they desperately need a champion to carry their message, someone whom the national media cannot ignore. And that should be McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. Except for one thing: He doesn’t go along with their approach in important ways. He sounds, sometimes anyway, like a liberal Democrat or a lobbyist for the environmental movement. …
Corner post on oil from VDH.
More advice for McCain. This from Charles Krauthammer.
In his St. Paul victory speech, Barack Obama pledged again to pull out of Iraq. Rather than “continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians, . . . [i]t’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.”
We know Obama hasn’t been to Iraq in more than two years, but does he not read the papers? Does he not know anything about developments on the ground? Here is the “nothing” that Iraqis have been doing in the past few months:
1. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra. It achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years: take the city, drive out the Mahdi Army and seize the ports from Iranian-backed militias.
2. When Mahdi fighters rose up in support of their Basra brethren, the Iraqi army at Maliki’s direction confronted them and prevailed in every town — Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Kut, Nasiriyah and Diwaniyah — from Basra to Baghdad.
3. Without any American ground forces, the Iraqi army entered and occupied Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold.
4. Maliki flew to Mosul, directing a joint Iraqi-U.S. offensive against the last redoubt of al-Qaeda, which had already been driven out of Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala provinces.
5. The Iraqi parliament enacted a de-Baathification law, a major Democratic benchmark for political reconciliation.
6. Parliament also passed the other reconciliation benchmarks — a pension law, an amnesty law, and a provincial elections and powers law. Oil revenue is being distributed to the provinces through the annual budget.
7. With Maliki having demonstrated that he would fight not just Sunni insurgents (e.g., in Mosul) but Shiite militias (e.g., the Mahdi Army), the Sunni parliamentary bloc began negotiations to join the Shiite-led government. (The final sticking point is a squabble over a sixth cabinet position.) …
Daily Telegraph, UK on Ireland’s defeat of the EU Treaty.
In the Irish language, there is no word for “no”. The Irish way of getting round this is to say instead: “It isn’t.” Yesterday we learnt that the Irish people, confronted with the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum, have said: “It isn’t.”
And that, exactly, is now the constitutional position of the treaty throughout the European Union. It isn’t. To become law, the treaty has to be approved by all 27 member states. This has not happened: the treaty is dead.
Unfortunately, most European leaders regard EU treaties as a chance to parody the principle of monarchy: “The treaty is dead. Long live the treaty.” Veterans of these disputes will remember that, when the Danes voted No to Maastricht in 1992, the then (Tory) Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, rushed to the House of Commons to explain that the Danish people had given the wrong answer: they would have to vote again until they gave the right one. In 2001, the Irish rejected the Nice Treaty. They, too, were made to vote again.
In 2005, when the French and the Dutch people killed the European Constitution in their referendums, the corpse was carried off to the Lisbon summit. By a bureaucratic miracle, it was born again as the Lisbon Treaty.
The trick almost worked: Ireland is the only member state that has had the chance to vote. In a community of more than 300 million voters, only three million have been permitted to express an opinion at the ballot box. Bravely, they have chosen what their rulers did not want.
It is being said already that this impertinent Irish behaviour should not be allowed to hold up the destiny of an entire continent. At the European Council at the end of next week, some version of life-support, resurrection or cloning will be applied to the Lisbon corpse. …
Contentions too.
Ireland has rejected the Lisbon Treaty (as Emanuele thought it might), by a decisive margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. The Treaty has had a long and entirely disreputable history. It was drawn up to replace the draft European Constitution, which was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. The European mandarins were wiser the second time round: they claimed the Treaty was only a modestly significant revision of existing practices made necessary by the EU’s expansion into Eastern Europe, instead of a radical power-grab by Brussels.
This claim fooled only those who wanted to believe it, but it offered some very necessary anti-democratic cover. Instead of exposing this monstrosity to the scrutiny of the voters, 26 of the 27 EU member states sought to hustle it through their parliaments. That includes Britain, where Labour, having campaigned in the 2005 general election on the promise of a referendum on the Constitutions, used its replacement by the Treaty as an excuse for dumping their promise. The reason Labour did this was obvious: there was no chance the British public would have approved the Treaty.
Only Ireland’s constitution made this impossible: the Irish, therefore, were voting not for themselves, but in the referendum denied to the rest of Europe. …
Bill Kristol with his Russert send-off.
… Tim was serious about serious things, but he wasn’t solemn.
Early in Moynihan’s first term, the senator placed a call to an upstate county chairman. The guy answered the phone, and Pat started to talk to him about some issue of the day.
“Tim — I don’t have time for this,” the politician interrupted the startled senator. “What … what … this is Senator Moynihan!” — Pat tried to explain. “Oh, [expletive] Tim, I’ve had enough of this [expletive],” said the local, hanging up on the esteemed solon.
This is how Pat Moynihan discovered that his press aide was accustomed to entertaining both his own staff in D.C. and politicians and friends around the country with hilarious, impromptu performances featuring dead-on mimicry of Moynihan’s distinctive speaking style.
I last heard Russert do his Moynihan imitation about a year ago. We were having lunch, and for some reason got to discussing Pat’s almost-Russert-career-ending phone call. Tim launched into a boisterous imitation of his beloved mentor. I cracked up, heads turned, and a few people at neighboring tables even joined in the laughter. …