More Carter / Bush Stories  

More notes on Carter vs the Bush / bin Laden family (via Mobjectivist).

Jerome Doolittle, who probably remembers Jimmy Carter better than anyone else in the blogosphere, says Thom Hartmann has a reminder for the rest of us that Bush was not consistent with the facts when he said our country never had an energy policy (and it's all Clinton's fault, of course): Carter Tried To Stop Bush's Energy Disasters - 28 Years Ago. Naturally, the Republicans derided him, but at least a few programs were established.

Carter's speech drew a strong reaction from the Saudis and the oil industry. Think tanks soon emerged - many whose names are today familiar - to suggest there was really no energy problem, and they led the charge to establish a permanent right-wing media in the US. Within two years, Saudi citizen and oil baron Salem bin Laden's sole US representative, James Bath, would funnel cash into the failing business of the son of the CIA's former director, political up-and-comer George H. W. Bush. With that money from the representative of Osama Bin Laden's half-brother, George Bush Jr. was able to keep afloat his Arbusto ("shrub" in Spanish) Oil Company. And he would be in the pocket of the bin Laden and Saudi interests for the rest of his life. But Carter was incorruptible.

And then there was the hostage crisis, and the illegal Bush-Reagan deal (and don't think oil played no role there, either) to keep the hostages until Reagan was sworn in:

And Ronald Reagan's first official acts of office included removing Jimmy Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House, and reversing most of Carter's conservation and alternative energy policies.

The Republicans and the Saudis - and particularly the Bush Family Empire - have been working to destroy our country's future for years. And they've taught everyone to laugh at any effort to prevent it. Well done, boys.

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite as odd as the right wing's insistence that global warming does not exist. I'm not a climatologist, but I can read what they're saying. In fact, they're screaming it. Rush Limbaugh is not a climatologist, either, nor are any of the rest of these pinheads who seem to think the whole thing is some figment of liberals' imagination.

There's nothing liberal about global warming, it's science. There seems to be some element of childish spite in the refusal to recognize it -- "Boy, we can drive the liberals crazy by pretending it's not happening, ha, ha, ha." If you read right-wing blogs, you find a kind of Beavis and Butthead attitude about the subject, a sort of adolescent-jerk humor. What's astonishing is finding the same attitude among members of Congress. Head-militantly-in-sand is not a solution.

There is a perfect convergence of economic, environmental and energy considerations that all point in the same direction: renewable energy sources. With demand for gasoline soaring worldwide, with the economies of both China and India growing at staggering paces, with the world somewhere near its oil peak now, our dependence on some of the world's most retrograde regimes is only going to get worse and more expensive.

Foreign policy also plays a role here. Let us pass quickly by the administration's pre-war assurances that Iraqi oil would pay for the war -- the country is pumping less now than it did under Saddam Hussein. How smart is it to dick around trying to oust the president of Venezuela? You put a bunch of ideological nutcases in charge of Latin American policy, and you're going to create a lot of enemies down there.

American energy policy -- written by Beavis and Butthead.