Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Drill, Baby, Drill 

...having only just got back to the crib, I haven't had a chance to review the reaction of lefty blogtopia® (skippy and all that), but I would suspect that this little bit of news, if it has even penetrated the wall of sound emanating from the Wall Street bailout at all, is not making the progressive netroots happy. There is the taint of one more example of Democratic capitulation in its failure to continue the longstanding moratorium on offshore oil exploration, but this time I suspect that the Democratic leadership has probably made the right decision...

All sorts of examples can be drawn with the effort that Newt Gingrich and the Republicans made to shut down the Federal government in 1995, and - to be honest - Democratic leadership in the current Congress stands a far better chance in the current social and political climate to find itself reprising the Gingrich (or Loser) role than being featured in the Clintonian (winner) role in another bitter government shutdown...

In the spirit of full disclosure, I suppose that I must mention that, yes, Federal government shutdowns have a direct personal effect on the wellbeing of my family, but that is perhaps just an interesting factoid...

The loser in a wide federal shutdown is the entity that is portrayed as being on the wrong side of any issue for purely political reasons. The reason the Republicans "lost" the '95 shutdown was because they were seen as being wrong on insider issues at the expense of paycheck-to-paycheck federal employees and customers who were suffering real harm with the loss of supposedly 'nonessential' services. This time around, the Democratic leadership is trying to maintain a long-accepted moratorium in the face of public sentiment that is shifting toward a 'drill, baby, drill' attitude because of outrageous gas prices (where sensible talk about long lead times and meaningless "benefits" are drowned out by Republican talking points enabled by the MSM). Congressional Dem's have three opponents in this game: Republicans, the MSM that willingly carries their water (in direct contradiction to all those things I actually learned in journalism classes before I changed my major to a field that allowed me to maintain my sanity and my sense of integrity), and the understandable self-interest of us little people who are paying crushing sums of money just to get to work and the kids to school, never mind silly things like superfluous trips to the coast or the movie theater 40 miles up the road in the "Big City"...

I've been in a pretty foul mood in recent days for reasons that are unrelated to but are remarkably resemblant of the situation Congressional Democrats find themselves in these days. The attitude I'm trying to fight off is "The hell with 'em". They had much more to lose than to gain in this fight because the MSM would have made sure to broadcast the core Repub talking point that "Democrats are willing to shut down the government and deny you your access to federal services AND keep your gas priced outrageously high so coastal liberal elitists don't have to look at offshore drilling equipment out their coastal liberal elitist windows". Yeah, it's capitulation and, yeah, it sucks, but we are an entire generation removed from Santa Barbara and the ecological damage due to oil spills resulting from recent Gulf hurricanes has been inadequately reported, so any sense of risk or proportion is a faded memory...

Humans are only egalitarian when it fits into their lifestyle. The effort by Congressional Democrats to maintain the offshore drilling moratorium doesn't fit into currently touted realities. Fighting that meme would have been a loser for the Democrats, even though the vast majority of those Americans who support offshore drilling don't ever have to face the prospects of shoveling tar balls off the front lawn and don't understand the basics of the discussion. Democrats are trapped in a 'damned if you do and damned if you don't' matrix, and the bottom line is that we will drill, baby, drill....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:41 PM

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