Still places worth drilling for oil, but what does U.S. do after that?

The debate over oil prices took a turn for the useless the moment our Dear Leader and his party’s heir began blaming $4-a-gallon gas on people who oppose drilling in the neighborhood of Florida’s beaches or in Alaska’s wildlife refuge. According to those two, the people in Jakarta and Sydney and London are paying more for gas because the people in Burlington and San Francisco and Daytona Beach were opposed to sucking up a few drips of oil from the Atlantic and the Arctic.

It’s never wise to trust an addict, but George Bush and John McCain are also pushers with a considerable clientele for cracked-up ideas, like consumers who think nothing about railing against social programs that help the poor but somehow feel their $40,000, 12-mpg SUV is entitled to cheap energy. Now they’re telling us that opening up more seas and federal lands to drilling will bring down the price of oil. That’s about as logical as suggesting that curing cancer will save Social Security — if by curing cancer more people will live longer and contribute more taxes to the Social Security trust fund. Even if it wasn’t mathematically outlandish, generating more tax dollars shouldn’t figure in the top 1,000 reasons to cure cancer. Just the same, there may be some reasons to drill for oil. Lowering the price of oil isn’t among them.

Smirking Chimp