Squaring the Culture

Leftists are predictably and tiresomely crowing “We told you so” in response to Scott McClellan’s tattler book. With the assistance of memeorandum, I selected one of the more serious leftist slime jobs and deconstructed it here.

The site is “Nukes & Spooks,” a blog by three McClatchy journalists. Their article contains a summary of the left’s disingenuous indictment against the Bush administration, based entirely on their own previous reporting, thereby making the point that McClellan’s book adds nothing new to the debate (the same point I made Wednesday). What they’re complaining about, though, is nothing more than normal governance in an uncertain environment, and review of their article confirms that that’s all they have. They’re trying to paint ordinary government workers as Snidely Whiplash, complete with maniacal cackle and curling moustaches. It would be funny if they weren’t so successful at it.

Here’s their indictment:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

The troubles with Iraq predated 9/11 by about 15 years. The US Congress had already confirmed US policy of regime change in Iraq as early as 1998, based on the invasion of Kuwait, followed by 7 years of Iraqi intransigence in meeting UN requirements. If the complaint is that the administration had Iraq in mind before 9/11, the only sane response is “Of course; why shouldn’t they have?”

Furthermore, administration personnel had discussed Middle East strategy far in advance of 9/11, and even in advance of taking office, and already had a plan in mind for pacifying the anti-American sentiment that was brewing in the Middle East. Yes, that plan involved Iraq. That the McClatchy folks find this somehow ominous suggests they think it’s a bad thing to be aware of current tensions and have a plan in mind. Color me unimpressed.

The alleged connection between the 1993 WTC bombing and Iraq was still under consideration at the time. I don’t recall that the administration used it as a reason supporting the Iraq invasion, for which reason I can’t imagine why it’s somehow damning that they sent someone to verify its accuracy. Yes, they already had Iraq in their sights; go reread the previous two paragraphs if you wonder why.

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

Yes, and if you’ll read the article they linked to, you’ll discover that the Bush administration stated this plainly and in public. There was certainly no outcry against his doing so at the time; the most common liberal response was that if we attacked Hussein, he’d use his WMDs on our troops, sending tens of thousands home in body bags. What, exactly, is their indictment? That they publicly stated that they intended to fulfill a policy that had been decided by an act of Congress in 1998? We’re supposed to be aghast at THAT? Why?

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods.

If you’ll read the McClatchy article they claim proves Cheney went “well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time,” what you’ll find is that we had no hard evidence pointing to an unusual breakthrough in weapons technology. If you’ll read Cheney’s speech that they linked to, you’ll discover that he acknowledges this and explains why it’s meaningless, because Hussein was engaged in an ongoing pattern of deception that had hoodwinked our intelligence, and the UN’s, before. Cheney’s point was that if we know Hussein is working on weapons, and we know he’s deceiving inspectors about what he’s doing, we’d be insane to simply assume he’s not getting anywhere. That’s not fantasy; that’s a sober assessment. To say otherwise is to counsel foreign policy based solely on wishful thinking; and if the administration HAD taken that passive approach, and Hussein had developed serious weapons, they would have condemned them for that, too. (Author’s update: Cheney’s argument here was echoed by Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller on the Senate floor on October 10, 2002. “We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam Hussein has been able to make in the development of weapons of mass destruction.” I’m curious to know how alleged misinformation could have produced Rockefeller’s agreement with such an argument.)

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished.

There’s always dissent to any major decision. Some point of view always loses. Anybody who wants to claim that their sober opinions were ignored will get plenty of opportunity to do so from any administration, discussing any topic. I can’t think of a single policy in any administration in which the complaint that “dissenters were ignored” could not be raised — for which reason I simply can’t understand what the indictment is supposed to be here. What is it, besides an insane demand that the President submit every internal decision to nationwide scrutiny?

They name Joseph Wilson among the dissenting voices. We already know why he was ignored — he was not even part of the administration, and he lied.

* The Bush administration didn’t even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs that’s justly received so much criticism since.

The administration’s case against Iraq contained a series of indictments that were already well-documented and had long been the subject of public debate. Claims included that Hussein had brutalized his own population, had destabilized the region by building an unusually large military and attacking his neighbors, had flouted UN resolutions, had fired at US aircraft, had reconstituted forbidden weapons programs, and had sponsored international terrorism. To my knowledge, the only parts of the entire case that have ever been disputed are the quantity of chemical weapons (but it’s admitted that he had some), the robustness of the nuclear program (but it’s admitted that he had one), and the use of aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons (they were actually for a missile system that was also forbidden by the terms of the UN agreement.) The bulk of the US case against Hussein was indisputable.

The call for an unwanted NIE was simply one of dozens of instances of the Democrats in Congress attempting to exercise unconstitutional powers over the conduct of the Executive branch of government. And I’m just curious: doesn’t the later criticism vindicate the assessment that an NIE was uncalled for?

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. (My note: see?) But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam’s WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

Yes. They assessed the evidence, reported what they believed was correct, and omitted what they believed was incorrect. This sounds like normal procedure to me. What’s the indictment?

* The core of the administration’s case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He’d give WMD to Islamist terrorists only “as a last chance to exact revenge.”

Leftists love to say that “the core” of the admininstration’s case was WMDs, but that was only one point; I outline the more complete case above, in the paragraph beginning “The administration’s case against Iraq…” They ignore the rest and focus on WMDs because that’s the only part of the case that’s even remotely debatable. They’ve done it so many times that they’re no longer aware how dishonest a tactic it is; but it’s dishonest, and at some point they must have known it.

As to what the CIA had “determined,” the interesting point is that the later evaluation of captured Iraqi documents concluded something very different. The research documents that Hussein’s government cooperated extensively with various terrorist organizations (of which al Qaeda is only one of dozens), that Hussein habitually used terrorism as a tool of statecraft, that his goals included attacks on America wherever he could pull it off, and even that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda when their goals coincided. This research confirms a major complaint the Bush administration leveled against Saddam Hussein’s government.

So the indictment against the Bush administration here has become that they rejected a CIA assessment that was incorrect. They should be applauding here, not condemning. In fact, I can’t imagine indicting the Bush administration for ignoring just about anything George Tenet told them.

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi… The same INC-supplied “intelligence” used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

I can’t comment on Chalabi, as I don’t know how much they relied on him. I simply know what the administration’s publicly stated case was; and I can’t find any part of it that was inaccurate, other than the quantity of chemical weapons and the intended use of aluminum tubes. And frankly, I’m not convinced that the quantity of chemical weapons was inaccurate; there’s some evidence that such weapons were found but not categorized as WMDs (because the shells weren’t filled, the chemical agents were still in barrels,) and some more evidence suggesting they might have been moved.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong.

To be sure, that wasn’t the culmination of anything other than an attempt to involve the UN. The real culmination was the President’s State of the Union address the previous month, which was pretty accurate (yes, even the famous 16 words that they later wimped out and waffled on. Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium, and British intelligence did tell us this.) But Powell’s report documented Iraqi efforts to sidestep inspectors, which was true. It documented that Hussein never intended to cooperate with the UN, which we know to have been true. It documented comments that many of the weapons had been evacuated; no evidence rebutting this has ever been presented, and it explains why we didn’t find stockpiles of chemical weapons. It documented weapons sites that had held weapons, but were empty when the UN inspectors arrived; there’s no reason to doubt this. “Virtually every allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong?” They wish.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks.

I listened to several broadcasts in which Vice President Cheney stated very, very clearly that they did not believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks; they did believe, however, that he was involved in financing and abetting international terrorists. This turned out to have been correct.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein’s regime’s own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

The same review found extensive relationships between Hussein’s regime and international terrorist groups, both explicit and implicit, and found an indirect relationship with al Qaeda. This report confirmed nearly everything the Bush administration had been saying about Iraq’s involvement in international terrorism. The extent of McClatchy’s sheer, outright lying on this subject has been documented earlier on this blog.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report.

That they failed to plan is simply false. That the plan was not so good, is true. The error of Paul Bremer’s approach to post-war Iraq is pretty well documented by now. We’ve adjusted. It’s working better now.

The claim that the Bush administration was somehow criminally negligent in its approach to the Iraq war, and got everything wrong, is false in nearly every particular. There are a few items they got wrong in the run-up, which is inevitable when relying on foreign intelligence. There are a lot more items they got exactly right. What we’re looking at in the McClatchy article is a hit job against a fairly ordinary administration. Scott McClellan adds nothing but another assenting voice to the worst, most incharitable interpretation of what was actually a fairly sensible policy process.

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Update: Doug Feith, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during the Bush administration, wrote a much more cogent book than Scott McClellan about the decision-making process in the run-up to the Iraq war, entitled War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. He addresses the inaccuracies of leftist memes like the McClatchy screed much more credibly than I ever could, by virtue of the fact that he was involved personally. Visit the web site he set up for marketing the book, which contains a number of since-declassifed source documents. Also, note the distinction between the press’ reception of Feith’s remarkably accurate insider account with that of McClellan’s: Both the Washington Post and the New York Times refused to review Feith’s book, which disputes the leftist line.

I just had to quote Ann Coulter’s latest column about the liberal hissy fit over President Bush’s comments about appeasement before the Israeli Knesset. Pertaining to the Obama campaign’s insistence that Bush was talking about him, Coulter notes their admission that Obama does want to appease dictators, explains the futility of doing so, then delivers the coup de grace:

Because, really, who better to face down a Holocaust denier with a messianic complex than the guy who is afraid of a debate moderated by Brit Hume?

Too funny, and too accurate.

Obama will make us work, and Clinton will take from us for our own good. All the European socialist countries backed away from socialism in the 1980s when they realized it was stifling their economies; so did Communist China, which is why China is now booming economically. Socialism has been discredited everywhere around the globe — except in the Democratic party in America. So, here’s to socialism in America:

Image obtained from Voice in Florida on sodahead.com.

I invite conservatives concerned with the future of the Republican party to view this diary at RedState.com, focusing on comments by Senator Jim Demint (R, SC).

The simple point is that we need to begin by emphasizing principles rather than policies. “Cutting taxes” is a policy, not a universal good in itself. It is suggested by the conservative principle of limited government; lower taxes means less government power to intrude. Demint argues for conservatives to review and appropriate their principles in political action.

This is an encouraging read, and my own point of view says it’s not possible to rehearse your principles too much, as they are the stuff life is made of.

Politico last night posted a preview of Scott McClellan’s tattler book “What Happened”, about his stint as White House Press Secretary from 2003-2006. As I read Mike Allen’s report, my reaction was ironically similar to the title of the book: “What happened to this guy?”

I haven’t read the book, so I can only go by Allen’s report. However, judging from the bullet points Allen emphasizes, the book adds nothing to the history of the events. What’s remarkable about the book is what Allen expresses here:

McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush’s liberal critics…

There are no new facts. McClellan simply gives in and say, “Yes, liberal press, all things were as you said.” The reasonable question is, “Why does he do that?”

This book is today’s blog troupe chatter, and the most common theme among them is “we don’t think much of Scott McClellan.” Those who agree with his interpretation of the events wonder why he didn’t complain at the time, or why he kept the job so long. Those who disagree remember him as a weak press secretary, too easily cowed by the liberals in the press.

It’s the last that strikes me as the most relevant; I suppose McClellan grew tired tying to gut out principled opposition to the propaganda machine — the press’, not the President’s — and decided to suck up to the “popular” kids instead by repeating their words. It won’t work. As he might have learned in junior high school, sucking up doesn’t make you popular, it just earns you the status of a despised hound.

It’s not as though we didn’t have to patiently rebut the leftloons’ faux outrage already, about such bosh as the President “outing” a “covert agent,” something liberal icons do without qualm whenever it serves their purpose and liberal robots dutifully accept as virtuous. However, McClellan’s psychic collapse will make their propaganda all that much more tiresome to rebuff; “Even his own people admit…” when in fact, it looks as though his own people simply wearied of standing for the truth and began reciting the mantras. I can see McClellan as Winston in 1984, facing the President and confessing, “I betrayed you.”

As a former high school and college debater, I was excited to see Oprah Winfrey’s production The Great Debaters get presented to the public, and I looked forward to seeing it. I watched it over the weekend with my wife, and enjoyed it. It wasn’t historically accurate, but it was entertaining.

The movie was predictably about civil rights, and debate topics were chosen to emphasize the civil rights theme for the fragments of the debates they showed us. The movie portrays an invitational debate in 1935 between Wiley College and Harvard College (which in fact never took place) on the topic, “Resolved: That civil disobedience serves a moral role.” In actual fact, the topic of the 1935 championship debate, which was against Southern Cal, not Harvard, was more likely about preventing international munitions shipments, as that was Phi Delta Kappa’s topic for that year.

I was struck by the quality of the education the characters in the movie had received even prior to attending Wiley College. This turns out to be fairly accurate; Professor Melvin Tolson of Wiley College was fierce in preparing his students for intellectual combat. The debaters in the film were able to quote extensively from the classics with genuine understanding, something I’m not able to do despite decades of self-education. One of my recurring disappointments is how badly I’ve been robbed by liberalism of a real education by being born in the wrong time in history; and as much as I read, I’m hacking around in the dark trying to recover the structure of knowledge that nearly everyone took for granted in those days. As with so many other topics, liberals addressed what they considered injustice and inequality in education, not by improving the education of the poor so it matched what the rich received, but by reducing the education of everybody to the least common denominator. They promise to do the same with medical care, using the same argument: some get better care than others, therefore we need national health care. This will result, not in better care for anybody, but in worse care for a large number of people who can actually afford better. When all education was private, the US had the best-educated public in the history of the world. We could have that again, if we could get the government to release education into private hands again.

The Harvard debate in the movie ends with an impassioned speech by 14-year-old James Farmer Jr., the only debater in the movie who was really on the historic team. Rebutting a claim by the previous speaker that “Nothing that erodes the rule of law can ever be moral,” Farmer began his talk “In Texas, they lynch Negros.” He goes on to assert an affirmative duty to oppose injustice “by violence or civil disobedience; you should pray that I choose the latter.”

Farmer in the movie just breezes by the correct argument, quoting St. Augustine’s “An unjust law is no law at all,” in favor of making Oprah Winfrey’s and Denzel Washington’s civil rights point, that violence in opposition to racism is appropriate. The correct argument is broader and more subtle. It is a crucial argument in our modern world, because the moral system of Progressivism is producing such incredibly distorted laws that it will eventually be necessary to oppose them.

The fictional Harvard debater was correct, nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral. However, nothing erodes the rule of law more surely than a grotesquely unjust law, unless perhaps it is an unjust law officer enforcing the law unevenly. When the law or the defenders of the law titanically fail the cause of justice, it becomes the duty of citizens to stand up to the injustice and force a change. This act, when conducted correctly in the defense of justice, upholds the rule of law, whereas unjust laws or unjust law officers erode the rule of law. History shows that these changes do not always come about through natural evolution of laws; sometimes it takes a little force.

An ironic side note of the question gets raised by the comment, “In Texas, they lynch Negros.” While apparently each of the debaters from Wiley College in the 1930s saw a lynching at one time or another, the truth is that lynching had pretty much died out by 1935. The year 1935 was the last year in the US that the number of lynchings nationwide reached double digits; there were 20 that year. Lynching was never routine, but reached its nadir around the turn of the century, after which it gradually petered out to nothing. The year 1935 was even after the race riots in major cities, which took place mostly before 1930. There may have been 5 lynchings in Texas in 1935; that’s obviously 5 too many, but it wasn’t a common event.

The point, though, is that lynching is an instance of civil disobedience in the mistaken pursuit of justice, by those who don’t know virtue. This makes the point that while civil disobedience can be a force for morality, it can only be so in the hands of those who have “by practice trained their senses to discern good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). Civil disobedience without virtue is vigilantism, and destroys the rule of law.

Those who would like to read further about this difficult topic ought at least to pick up a copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters From Prison. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian, involved himself in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler during WWII, and was jailed by the Nazis. His letters explain his reasoning somewhat. I recommend them.

The political chatter this weekend has been about Hillary Clinton invoking the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as her reason for staying in the race. It’s all a little silly, but none of the talk is sillier than those who take it as a threat against Barack Obama’s life. It’s not that.

There was a dark undercurrent of suspicion against the Clintons during the Clinton administration, during which a surprising number of associates and/or investigators of the Arkansas governor wound up either threatened or dead, spurring comments about “Arkancide” (suspicious suicides in Arkansas) and about the probability of one couple knowing that many people who died in accidents, suicides, or homicides. It’s not quite as big a stretch to imagine that Hillary Clinton might know the kind of folks that could do in a political rival as it is to imagine that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would plan the destruction of the World Trade Towers, though it’s a stretch in the same direction. It’s an impossible stretch, however, to imagine that she’s stupid enough to try this against a candidate who’s protected by the Secret Service. That’s simply not going to happen.

Clinton’s signature tactic has been to dangle bait in front of the worst impulses of human beings. If she thinks there are racists in the voting audience, she drops little hints that can be taken as racist remarks. If she thinks there are xenophobes, she drops hints about Obama’s education in a madrassa in Indonesia. What she’s doing is trolling for votes. It isn’t that Ms. Clinton really believes these things are relevant, it’s that she believes there are voters who do, and she wants badly enough to win that she’ll do what it takes to secure their vote on that basis. She and her husband have come to expect that they’ll easily survive whatever negative impact such tactics might have, because they’ve survived the blow-back dozens of times. Outrage dies quickly; human beings have only so much energy for outrage, and most often do nothing after expressing it. Meanwhile, the hook has been planted in those naive enough to bite the bait, and eventually they obey their worst impulses. The Clintons have always benefited from fanning into flame the worst in human weakness.

This talk of Kennedy’s assassination is just more of the same. There’s a measurable number of Democrats who believe that Obama will be assassinated by racists if he’s nominated. Clinton has nothing to lose by reminding these people of the possibility; she hopes they might decide to avoid the inevitable disaster and vote for her. She’s trolling for the vote of fearful liberals stuck in the 60s civil rights mentality, and she knows how many of those there are. Nor is this the first time she’s done this.

It’s not all that unusual for politicians to try to benefit from the worst in human beings. Few politicians, however, do it so often, nor so systematically, as the Clintons. It’s one of the reasons that their exit from the political stage in America cannot happen soon enough. They are the worst, and they bring out the worst in everybody else.

Barack Obama joined Bill Clinton’s legacy in blaming talk radio for mindless hatred, an accusation so bereft of logic that it deserves to be identified as a hate crime in itself.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama used a Florida fundraiser to attack conservative media personalities Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh for their militant stand on immigration policy.

Appearing Thursday at the Westin Diplomat near Fort Lauderdale, Obama lashed out at critics of illegal immigrants and migrant workers.

During his speech, Obama said, “A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year.”

Liberals get a free pass when using race-baiting or divisive speech, but they should not. There is no connection whatsoever — none — between legitimate opposition to insane immigration policy and race hatred. The attempt to link them constitutes the very worst in divisive politics, and constitutes a hate crime in every possible sense of the word.

You all need to read Charles Krauthamer’s essay at Townhall today regarding Obama’s running gaffe about sitting down with our enemies to negotiate. Krauthamer compares the reality of international negotiations with Obama’s fantasy world, and calls it the absurdity that it is.

From the top:

When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has gone surreal. Another unmistakable sign is when a presidential candidate makes a gaffe, then, realizing it is too egregious to take back without suffering humiliation, decides to make it a centerpiece of his foreign policy.

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure — then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration’s refusal to do so not just “ridiculous” but “a disgrace.”

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity…

There are always contacts through back channels or intermediaries. Iran, for example, has engaged in five years of talks with our closest European allies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, to say nothing of the hundreds of official U.S. statements outlining exactly what we would give them in return for suspending uranium enrichment.

Obama pretends that while he is for such “engagement,” the cowboy Republicans oppose it. Another absurdity. No one is debating the need for contacts. The debate is over the stupidity of elevating rogue states and their tyrants, easing their isolation and increasing their leverage by granting them unconditional meetings with the president of the world’s superpower.

Go read the rest, Krauthamer at his best.

The Democratic-controlled Congress has become a reliable source of entertainment for those of us who watch politics. The press generally does not report their worst foibles, but the public has gotten the sense that the 110th Congress is setting new records for sheer ineffectiveness. Congress’ approval rating is much lower than President Bush’s, and that’s saying something.

John Hinderaker at Power Line documents Congress’ latest embarrassment, oil industry executives explaining themselves in front of the Senate. Organized as a public scold session for lawmakers to face down those evil, consumer-gouging oil profiteers, it apparently turned into a showcase of how government has forced the US to depend on foreign sources. This happens every time the Senate drags oil executives onto the carpet, as oil executives are smarter than Senators. However, this actually serves the Senators’ purposes as well, as I explain at the end, so maybe they’re not so stupid after all.

Hinderaker quotes Steve Simon, Senior VP at Exxon Mobile:

Exxon Mobil is the largest U.S. oil and gas company, but we account for only 2 percent of global energy production, only 3 percent of global oil production, only 6 percent of global refining capacity, and only 1 percent of global petroleum reserves. With respect to petroleum reserves, we rank 14th. Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects requiring enormous long-term investments.

To simply maintain our current operations and make needed capital investments, Exxon Mobil spends nearly $1 billion each day.

The Executives also explained that American oil companies have access to only about 7% of world oil reserves; national oil companies (companies owned by national governments) control about 75% of world reserves. One of the results of this situation is that oil companies have to purchase crude oil from other sources in order to refine it for the US market. Thus, oil companies have no control over the price of crude oil; they’re simply passing costs of crude along to the consumer.

John Hofmeister of Shell Oil explained that Congress is the reason oil companies have so little access to oil reserves:

According to the Department of the Interior, 62 percent of all on-shore federal lands are off limits to oil and gas developments, with restrictions applying to 92 percent of all federal lands. We have an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Atlantic Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Pacific Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico, congressional bans on on-shore oil and gas activities in specific areas of the Rockies and Alaska, and even a congressional ban on doing an analysis of the resource potential for oil and gas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico.

The Argonne National Laboratory did a report in 2004 that identified 40 specific federal policy areas that halt, limit, delay or restrict natural gas projects…

When many of these policies were implemented, oil was selling in the single digits, not the triple digits we see now. The cumulative effect of these policies has been to discourage U.S. investment and send U.S. companies outside the United States to produce new supplies.

As a result, U.S. production has declined so much that nearly 60 percent of daily consumption comes from foreign sources.

They also made the point that Congress makes more profit on gasoline sales than oil companies, with taxes averaging 15% of the price of gasoline where oil company profit constitutes only about 4%. This profit number is a bit misleading, however, as it expresses mostly the markup at the pump. Oil companies make most of their money from the sale of crude oil, and very little from the sale of gasoline.

To explain, adding to my lecture about the oil industry from a few weeks ago: the profit numbers they’re using don’t include profits made from the sale of crude oil, because they don’t produce all the crude from which they make their gasoline. They refine more crude oil than they produce, so they’re actually net consumers of crude oil, and they have to buy it on the open market.

Most large oil companies are vertically integrated; that is, they’re involved in every aspect of the oil business, from drilling to pumping gasoline. However, different parts of the company operate as separate companies from an accounting standpoint. Sometimes Exxon Mobil’s oil production company sells its crude to Exxon Mobil’s refining company, sometimes not. Location has a great deal to do with who buys what oil, because the buyer pays the shipping costs. American refiners like to buy from Venezuela, Canada, and Mexico, whereas they’re less likely to buy from Russia or Iran. For an oil company like Exxon Mobil, this means they might pump crude oil in Kuwait and sell it to, say, China, and then turn around and buy crude oil produced by a different company in Canada.

All of this is to say that when Exxon Mobile reports profit on a gallon of gasoline, it doesn’t reflect the profit they might have made on the crude oil used to produce the gasoline. They can’t include crude oil profits in their gasoline profit figures, because it wasn’t all their crude, and because producing crude is accounted for separately. That 4% profit figure on the sale of gasoline is understated.

To continue the Congress narrative:

Senator Hatch walked Hofmeister through the possibility of producing oil from shale in the western states. The problem with this approach is that shale oil would be expensive to produce, and if they produce enough of it — the amount of oil available in American shales is greater than the Saudi oil field overall — it could easily drop the price of crude below the production price of the oil itself. Hofmeister tried to explain this, but Senator Hatch didn’t seem to get it; even the conservative Senators aren’t as bright as the oil execs, it seems.

A final shot from Hinderaker:

The committee’s Democrats attempted no response. They know that they are largely responsible for the current high price of gasoline, and they want the price to rise even further. Consequently, they have no intention of permitting the development of domestic oil and gas reserves that would both increase this country’s energy independence and give consumers a break from constantly increasing energy costs.

Recall that Al Gore is on record favoring energy taxes to encourage conservation. Congressional Democrats agree; they think high oil prices are the best thing since sliced bread. However, they have to maintain their populist image for their base, hence the dog-and-pony show. They know the public won’t ever see how they’ve been pwn3d by the oil execs.