RUSH: There’s an all-out assault here on the US military taking place in the Drive-By Media. To set it up, I want to go back to yesterday, CNN’s American Morning. The cohostette, Kiran Chetry talked with the president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister. She said to him, ‘People are very fed up about the price of oil, and you set out to explain to them, once more, about why we’re seeing this rise in oil?’
HOFMEISTER: Well, it was more to listen, listen to Americans about their issues, their concerns to see what could we possibly do about it — and I’ll tell you, I’ve come away with a very strong conclusion, and that conclusion is, it’s time for Americans to agitate their government to open up more oil and gas resources in this country. We are slipping in our production of oil and gas in this country year over year. We are prohibited from 85% of the Outer Continental Shelf. Most Americans don’t know —
CHETRY: What you’re saying is you can only do offshore drilling at about 15%?
HOFMEISTER: Fifteen percent, that’s it. So we’re pulling on exports from around the world into this country. We have billions and billions of barrels of oil that we can’t touch in this country by public policy. It’s time to tell our politicians, ‘Let’s get more oil and gas in the short term so we can work on alternative energies over the longer term.’
RUSH: This is a drumbeat that we have been sounding on this program for I don’t how long, and these people that are clamoring for the end to dependence on foreign oil, the environmentalist wackos, the Democrats, American leftists. You just heard the number: 85%. We can’t get it. I don’t care whether it’s in ANWR, the Gulf, or off the Left Coast, we can’t get it by virtue of public policy. That means elected officials in both the federal government and state governments are stopping it on the basis of the fear of oil spills or accidents or whatever. How often do you hear about this at an oil platform in the Gulf? How often do these happen? They don’t. They only happen when some ship captain gets drunk and drives into a tanker bridge or something else. But that’s it. It’s part of the business anyway, to be quite honest with you. This has been one of the most frustrating things, and this is part of portraying the whole image of the country today as doom and gloom. We’re heading into Thanksgiving, and we’re supposed to be miserable. The price of oil is going up; air travel is going to be jammed because airports are so crowded, blah, blah, blah. The price of turkey is going up. War news in Iraq is bad because they can’t get the troops funded.
They’re just doing everything they can to make you as miserable as possible, and I implore you to not believe it. This guy said he had to go out on a tour of the country, the president of Shell Oil. He said he wanted to listen to people, and what he heard shocked him. They don’t know how much oil is available to us, domestically, because they’re not being told. The second thing is the ChiComs are drilling with the Cubans in the Gulf right now. The Mexicans have just found a huge field, as did Brazil. Eight and a half billion barrels, Brazil just found, maybe more than that. Everybody in the world, if they have oil as a resource is doing what they can to get it — except us! We’re talking about conservation, and we’re talking about all these alternative sources, like hybrids, and natural gas powered buses for public transportation, which nobody wants to use, by the way, other than places where there’s no choice like New York. When’s the last time you saw a light-rail train full with anybody? Nobody wants to ride that garbage. But all these people want to get the projects built because, ‘They’ll save the environment, and it will cost less per passenger to transport them, Mr. Limbaugh, to and from their worker jobs.’
In the meantime, we are a growing economy. Conservation is fine. Not wasting is fine, but that does not constitute growth. I’m going to tell you, the American people, they may not know about all the oil that’s left untapped, but what they do have is expectations that every year their lives are going to get better economically, because they’re Americans. That’s what it means to them to be Americans: Life is going to get better. It ain’t if we stop growing! We are a growth economy. We always have been, and that’s exactly what’s under assault with global warming, by the way. One more sound bite here before we go to the break. Kiran Chetry, CNN, said, ‘Well, should people start looking at ways to cut their usage like buying smart cars, buying hybrids, trying to use less?’
HOFMEISTER: Well, everything that we can do to conserve helps in the short term. Over the longer term, we need more energy. As the economy grows, we need more energy. People like their lifestyle. They want to drive; we want to help them drive.
RUSH: Amen. But yet Big Oil is the enemy, and Hillary Clinton wants to take their profits.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me tell you how the Democrats and the American left look at this energy business. The thing that you have to understand is, it ain’t about America. All this talk about alternative energy and hybrids, that’s not about making America better. All this talk and conversation is not about making America cleaner. The way they think: power votes, getting as many people in their base to vote for them as possible, as many independents. By keeping the oil that we have, that we could drill and would decrease dependence on foreign oil. By keeping our oil in the ground and untapped, they become heroes to the environmentalist wackos. Then when the shortages, the necessity to import and that suppression of supply is depressed, what happens to price? Look at the price of oil now. Some of it’s speculation; some of it’s supply and demand. The price is going to continue to go up. And what happens then? When the low supply, the artificially low supply — there needn’t be a low supply given our reserves that are untapped — that low supply drives up the price, they become the heroes of the poor and the freezing. How do they do that? Because they then attack Big Oil for gouging. And, of course, everybody hates Big Oil, just like they hate the boss.
So you’ve got people in the Northeast who use home heating oil and the price is going up because we’ve got an artificially depressed supply, thanks to Democrats. Those people have to pay through the roof for their heating oil, and the Democrats become their champions. They don’t solve any problem unless Hugo Chavez comes to the rescue and sells it cheap. So the very people that are causing rising prices benefit twice from causing it. A, the environmentalist wackos love them and give them lots of money, and B, the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the freezing, think the Democrats are the ones standing up for them. That’s the way they look at it. They’re not interested in improving America’s lot in the world, particularly not when a Republican is in the White House. Listen to this. This is a couple nights ago on CNN, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and the Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr on the military’s use of oil.
STARR: If you think it’s expensive to fill your gas tank, just consider what the military is going through right now. From Iraq to the high seas, every day the US military guzzles 340,000 barrels of oil in the tanks, ships, and planes it uses. The week before the war in Iraq began back in 2003, the cost of oil was just under $40 a barrel. Now it’s nearly a hundred dollars a barrel, and the cost of all of this to Americans is about $124 billion.
RUSH: Yeah, you see? I told you there is an all-out assault on the US military, including now with oil and fuel and how much they use and waste and so forth, or how much it costs us. That’s only our freedom out there using this stuff. How come, Ms. Starr, you don’t go find out how much it’s costing American taxpayers to fund Social Security, and Medicare, and Medicaid, and all the redundant children’s health programs out there? Why don’t you tell us how much that’s costing taxpayers? If it costs taxpayers $124 billion to fuel the military, that is cheap compared to the 65% of our budget which is entitlements — $124 billion is a cheap investment, given what that fuel is used for. Now we gotta attack the military and how much it’s costing Americans. These people are despicable. It’s hard for me not to say that I detest these people and the way they think, and the way they want to present news to people — or the way they want to constantly make people mad, and make ’em feel helpless and hopeless, doom and gloom and all of this. This is the greatest country in the world, and the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party alliance is designed to sabotage that.