Barack Obama, Oil Prices and Reality

By Derek Hunter
Sunday, March 18, 2012

Is there anything worse than this president? I mean, maybe having worms is worse, but I never spent the night at an Occupy Wall Street camp, so I don’t know for sure. But I have had Barack Obama as my president for more than three years, and it’s been a disaster.

Seriously, if I wanted to be lied to regularly, I’d rather do a daily affirmation in the bathroom mirror than watch him tour community college gymnasiums to claim credit for what he hasn’t done and blame all his problems on someone else.

When he was running for president, then-Sen. Obama basically told people President George W. Bush owned Exxon/Mobil and Vice-President Dick Cheney’s pacemaker was a secret implant from Halliburton that contained a hidden valve to control the world’s oil supply. Now that prices have gone through the roof and he needs to hide, the president presents himself as a helpless observer at the mercy of evil oil speculators.

He’ll tell you the United States is producing more oil than ever before, but he fails to add that’s because of the drilling leases approved by the previous administrations (both Clinton and Bush), or how most of that is on private lands because he’s rejected new drilling leases on public lands at a record pace. He’s had as much to do with the oil production in this country as the number of jobs created by his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline – zero.

He’s said several times we have only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves but use 20 percent of the world’s oil.

First, who cares? We use the oil we need. We don’t buy it to set it on fire so we can make s’mores and roast weenies on a stick while telling ghost stories about “saved or created” jobs.

Second, the line is designed to mislead. Aside from being untrue (he’s talking about the oil his government will allow companies to drill, which isn’t anywhere close to all we have in this country, which he won’t let us drill), it’s like comparing apples to lobotomized Kennedy children (Google it). The first one is all the oil in the world still under ground (which, as I said, is a lie), the other is all the oil the population of the world uses. He’s carving a tiny chip off a huge number and presenting them as if they’re one in the same.

What does it matter how much of “the world’s oil” we use? There aren’t countries around the world with cars sitting idle because we’ve used up their share of oil. That’s like saying people who work out use more than their share of oxygen because they breathe heavier. And if only they’d take a few days off every now and then, fat people on couches eating Doritos would be able to exercise, too.

President Obama seems to think it’s “unfair” we use so much oil compared to the rest of the world. This is insane. Nobody is sitting around thinking they could cure cancer if only the United States used less oil, but the damned United States just keeps sucking it up like it’s a fat kid trying desperately to get that first sip of milkshake up the straw.”

Oil prices are so high because we have amateurs running the show. Being a professional rabble-rouser, which was about the extent of the president’s resume when he was hired, doesn’t exactly translate well into managing the world’s problems or its biggest economy.

His government has been printing money like it’s an Olympic event and he’s going for the gold. By the way, this is why gold prices have gone through the roof and is not unrelated to why gas prices are so high.

He also has stirred up a hornet’s nest in the Middle East – cheering and encouraging protesters while an ally in Egypt was toppled, but remaining silent when Iran, the biggest threat to a gigantic portion of the current supply of oil, faced a similar uprising.

If you wrote a movie script about how horribly Barack Obama has handled energy policy, nobody would believe it. It’s simply too crazy. But if you did write that script, changed the name of the president and put an R behind his name, Steven Spielberg would sign on to direct Tom Hanks in it.

It would, of course, tank, but I’m sure the money could be more than made up for by some sort of “green energy” grant from the EPA. Considering how Obama is paying off his friends through that money laundering scam, it might actually be the least wasteful grant they make this year.