Reply #10: a link to Clooney's Esquire interview

[jean]

http://clooneynews.com/esquire05.htm

George talks about being President:

If I were president? Well, I’d do a few things. You realize that in order to be elected, I’d have to run on the “Yep, I did it” ticket. “Is it true that you did drugs?” Yep, I did it. “Did you sleep with …?” Yep, I did it.


And if I was somehow elected after all that, then I’d be shot because the first thing I’d try to do is take oil off the table. But let’s say I tried to do it. Remember when Kennedy got the space program going in 1961, saying in ten years we’d put a guy on the moon? At that point, rockets were falling off launchpads and monkeys were getting killed and there were people who said, This guy is out of his mind. But we did land on the moon in 1969. And new technologies came out of that experience.


So if I’m president, I say, “We’re at war? Really?” Because it doesn’t seem like it. Usually when you’re at war, people sacrifice. Let’s face it, Rosie the Riveter ain’t exactly out there. The only sacrifice I see is coming from the 150,000 kids who enlisted and had the war dropped in their laps. So, okay, this is a war? Let’s take the other side’s weapons away. Their weapon is oil. Ten years from today, we’re not going to have cars that run on internal-combustion engines. At some point we’re going to have to do it anyway, because oil is finite. So why don’t we take the leap right now?

If we take oil off the table now, suddenly all of those little countries that really didn’t come into power until the thirties -- and did so only because there was oil under their sands -- will go back to the sort of power structure that they were originally designed to have. They don’t get to control our economy. The Saudis don’t get to own a billion dollars’ worth of American stock and a billion dollars of our debt. We take away the thing that makes them so powerful, and we create a new technology along the way. It’s a new day.