Chinese Take Out?

Clueless Cheney tries to scare us into drilling everything.

by David Faris

With gas prices hovering over $4 a gallon across the U.S., the doyens of petrophilia are pulling out all the stops in an effort to get the U.S. to lift all environmental restrictions on drilling for oil. The latest salvo came when the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, repeated a claim by columnist George Will that the Chinese are drilling for crude in conjunction with Cuba off the coast of Florida.

What we were meant to think, of course, was OMG the Red Chinese are near Miami Beach! Someone get Dean Rusk and Bobby Kennedy in a room together and blockade Cuba!

Will and Cheney's utterly fabricated (and now retracted) allegation rolls two big wingnut bugaboos into one — an irrational fear of Cuba, a country whose geopolitical power couldn't light up an ice-fishing shack — and anger at The Left, which cares more about dolphins than it does about filling the tanks of Lincoln Navigators. Add a dollop of official China Paranoia and you have not only the recipe for a manufactured strategic crisis right out of the Gulf of Tonkin playbook but also a ready-made electoral issue that John McCain immediately pounced on.

Yet no amount of China-mongering and liberal-bashing can distract people from the reality of high energy prices. Denial of the looming crisis is rampant in Greater Right-Wingostan. Conservative economists are all over the place claiming that if only we'd unleash the free market, the oil would once again flow like Miller Lite at a College Republicans convention.

They have invented a new set of harmless-sounding code words, including the "outer continental shelf" to go along with "ANWR" (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) as places we should immediately dispatch exploration teams. They neglect to mention that the economic impact of all this drilling will be marginal and not felt for years.

Conservative economist Larry Kudlow recently hinted darkly that liberal forces were responsible for your expensive gasoline. "Then there's the oil nobody is talking about," he intoned conspiratorially, referring to the "Bakken fields" of North Dakota, Montana and Saskatchewan as if it were some Qatar-like gold mine lying fallow due to the interference of tofu-munching hippies. Somehow Kudlow forgot to mention that all of the "oil" buried in Bakken is encased in rock and that despite great effort no one has ever figured out how to extract it at a reasonable cost. Hey Larry, sometimes people aren't talking about it because it doesn't exist. Kind of like your credibility.

In the larger scheme of things, what the China incident demonstrates — other than that Cheney needs a better fact-checker — is that you can expect increased saber-rattling over the issue as it becomes the number one point of contention between the world's great powers.

U.S. jitters over China will only get worse in the years to come, and it would be helpful not to have guys like the VP in charge of keeping the peace. This crowd wakes up with a hankering for war like normal people want a cup of coffee.

Unfortunately for Dick Cheney, Larry Kudlow and everyone who believes in unicorns and trickle-down economics, all the world's derricks and all the world's drills can't put the oil economy back together again. Whatever the cost of oil, it will always be free for patriots to scan the beaches for incoming Chinese oil workers and for debased politicians to sell out the environment for a two-cent drop in the price of gas.

Brian Howard is on vacation. His editor's letter will return next week.