Drill Or Bust

NRO has some sound advice for congressional Republicans if they want to both do what's best for American consumers and businesses being bled by runaway energy prices and benefit politically from a Godsend of a wedge issue in the November election: screw compromise!:

The latest half-baked idea comes from a “gang of ten” senators — five Republicans, five Democrats — who have offered a compromise that would lift the ban on offshore drilling in exchange for $20 billion in new federal spending on alternative sources of energy. The list — ag-friendly guys like Saxby Chambliss and Kent Conrad, corn-staters like Ben Nelson and John Thune — smells of ethanol. The compromise bill includes $2.5 billion for biofuel research and billions more in incentives for automakers to make cars with ethanol-burning engines. There might be a smart way for Washington to subsidize research into alternative energy, but this isn’t it.

There is a simpler solution. The congressional ban on drilling has to be renewed each year, and the current ban expires in September, so congressional Republicans and President Bush should fight to stop the ban’s renewal. The Democrats are backpedaling like mad. Their presidential candidate doesn’t have a coherent position and has resorted to Carter-esque lectures on energy conservation. Meanwhile, the speaker of the House is telling vulnerable members of her caucus to support lifting the ban.

The Democrats find themselves on the wrong side of the most important issue to Americans right now. Now is not the time for a compromise. It’s time to keep applying pressure.

That counsel was offered two days ago.  This Senate GOP video came out today.  It doesn't sound to me like Republican senators are paying attention:

Beats me what pre-emptively offering the Dems most, of their energy agenda is supposed to get us.  To my ideological ear it sounds like the minority mentality in action.  As if the GOP side of this "gang of ten" doesn't realize just how over a barrel they have the Dems on this issue and just assumes that they've got to make a bunch of concessions to even get their "colleagues" to come to the table.  And, yes, they reek of ethanol - which inflates food prices, if anybody is keeping score at home.

But ask yourself one question: if gas prices hadn't gone through the roof this summer, would coughing up twenty-five billion dollars in "alternative" energy pork persuade the Dems to lift the congressional drilling ban one jot or tittle?  Or would the majority be gleefully bulldozing through many times that much, with these same sadsack 'Pubbies me-tooing right along in their wake?

We have finally arrived at the day of reckoning for a generation of the Left's environmental extremism.  The same public that has been brainwashed into believing that "going green" is undiluted virtuosity is now seeing the heretofore secret price tag attached to it, and is figuring out the swindle.  They've been played for suckers by utopianist authoritarian radicals, and they're pushing back.

Better late than never - especially as without a tearing down of the Dems' anti-energy wall, the problem will only get worse:

A “supply crunch” will affect the world market within the next five to ten years, the Chatham House report said.

While there is plenty of oil in the ground, companies and governments were failing to invest enough to ensure production, it added.

Only a collapse in demand can stave off the looming crisis, report author Professor Paul Stevens said.

“In reality, the only possibility of avoiding such a crunch appears to be if a major recession reduces demand - and even then such an outcome may only postpone the problem,” he said in The Coming Oil Supply Crunch.

You think $4.30 per gallon for unleaded regular, borne of $147 a barrel oil at its recent peak is outrageous?  Try two hundred bucks a barrel and six bucks a gallon while the Light-Bringer's dry-well "alternative" energy promises pied-piperize us down the road to permanent depression and economic collectivization, to say nothing of the national security implications and the fact that so many tires will blow out from over-inflation that Obama will have to nationalize Firestone, Goodyear, and Les Schwab just to keep the "middle class" whole.

Republicans are the political beneficiaries of this tempest by default.  They do themselves no favors by pursuing any course that mitigates the heat on their foes in the slightest, or enables the Donks to steal credit for letting the drilling ban lapse, sneak past the election, and then reimpose it as a rider slipped into some other typical mammoth omnibus legislation next year in the middle of the night when (they hope) nobody is looking.

One compromises when one is in a position of weakness.  When one has the upper hand, one goes for the jugular.

Dem throats are exposed.  The time for an elephant stampede is now.