How the Thugocracy Operates

RUSH: The Wall Street Journal today on the op-ed page: ‘The drilling experts speak out on the Obama Deepwater moratorium.’ Now, what this piece does is explores yet another ugly facet of the Obama regime, namely its daily load of lies. Now, the case in point here is the use of the names of a number of drilling experts who the White House claimed were in support of its drilling moratorium. In fact, the experts were not asked about the wisdom of such a moratorium. They have said forthrightly that they oppose it. Using their names was flagrantly dishonest. They signed the recommendations and Obama’s goons added the moratorium ban after they signed it. They were not informed that they were being asked to endorse a drilling moratorium. But what’s a little thing like intellectual honesty when you have ideas that will, ahem, save the world?

‘Before the Obama Administration sweeps under the carpet the controversy over the drilling experts it falsely used to justify its moratorium, the incident bears another look. Not least because it underlines the purely political nature of a drilling ban that now threatens the Gulf Coast economy and drilling safety. When President Obama last month announced his six-month Deepwater moratorium, he pointed to an Interior Department report of new ‘safety’ recommendations. That report prominently noted that the recommendations it contained — including the six-month drilling ban — had been ‘peer-reviewed’ by ‘experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.’ It also boasted that Interior ‘consulted with a wide range’ of other experts. The clear implication was that the nation’s drilling brain trust agreed a moratorium was necessary,’ following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Well, as the Journal has noted, ‘the opposite is true. In a scathing document, eight of the ‘experts’ the Administration listed in its report said their names had been ‘used’ to ‘justify’ a ‘political decision.’ The draft they reviewed had not included a six-month drilling moratorium. The Administration added that provision only after it had secured sign-off. … The Administration insisted this was much ado about nothing.’ So the Journal decided ‘to call some of these experts ourselves. Their information, and concerns, are revealing. … And the report they agreed to did address moratoria: It recommended a six-month ban on new deepwater permits. Yet Benton Baugh, president of Radoil, said that in at least two separate hour-and-a-half phone calls among Interior and the experts, there was no discussion of a moratorium on existing drilling. ‘Because if anybody had [made that suggestion], we’d have said ‘that’s craziness.”’

Can I translate this for you in simple language? The Obama administration gets hold of some oil experts via the interior department, and they said, ‘We’re talking here, we think we oughta temporarily have a moratorium on future new rigs and drilling offshore until we figure out what happened here.’ These experts said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ and they signed it. The Obama administration then puts out a different document, saying that they had agreed to a moratorium on existing rigs. They’ve said, ‘We never saw that, that was not in the document they asked us to sign. They are using our signatures for a political process.’ Folks, I don’t know how to characterize this. And what are these experts going to do? They’re doing as much as they can do here by going public in the Wall Street Journal with it, but they see what’s happening to Hayward. They see what’s happening to British Petroleum. Sorry, BP. They see what’s going on here.

So this administration, operating as organized crime, as a thugocracy, is basically intimidating any opposition into silence and just shutting up. I’m not naive enough to think this stuff hasn’t happened before, but the scope that it happens in this administration, every day on everything they touch turns sour. Everything they say they’re trying to fix gets broken worse than it was. But to lie to oil drilling experts and reissue a document that they actually didn’t sign to buttress your indefensible position, this is the kind of gang stuff they make comedy movies out of, except this isn’t funny. This is for real.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It was last June 11th, by the way, there was a story on how these moratorium drilling experts were totally exploited and misused. They were defrauded, essentially. The story was all out there last week, but we have a one-party media as well so no big deal was made. About all that happened was the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, apologized to these experts for having mistakenly, accidentally put their name to a document they had actually not signed. We’re sorry, but there’s nothing we can do about it now!