Blatant Bush tilt toward big oil

[maddezmom]

~snip~
And in politics, the Bush campaign has been spending a few million dollars to warn the country of the real threat to our energy future -- John Kerry. In public Bush warns that higher gasoline taxes imperil us all, and his breathtakingly false TV ad claims Kerry want a 50-cent hike. No matter that he never proposed one and never voted for one, just that he once made one casual statement 11 years ago in favor of the idea as part of a much larger, hypothetical budget deficit reduction package that never made it off a drawing board. The president's energy policy for the masses is implacable opposition to higher gasoline taxes that no one is proposing.

Here's what he is actually doing. At a time when supplies are tight and prospects for improvement are grim, Bush continues to authorize the purchase of oil on the open market for the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Bush is buying serious quantities of oil in a high-price market, helping to keep it that way. He is doing so, by the way, in cavalier disregard of a bipartisan majority in the Senate, which recently voted to urge him to stop until the market stabilizes, as did Kerry.

As for OPEC, the cartel's meeting in Vienna last week to reaffirm its determination to cut production still more was well publicized in advance. In the past, both Republican and Democratic administrations have rolled up their sleeves and lobbied, cajoled, and threatened OPEC in the interests of more stability and the world's economic health -- more often than not with some impact.

But not President Bush. His energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, petulantly claims that begging for oil is not in his job description. The administration let OPEC alone and confined itself to a lame White House statement of regret when it acted with impunity last week. Last weekend, OPEC's dominant member -- Saudi Arabia -- started a PR mini-offensive to convince Americans that the current mess is really our fault for not having enough refinery capacity; the Bush people, who are famously linked by family business and geopolitics to this nonfriend, let the insult pass without a response.

~snip~
more: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/articles/2004/04/06/blatant_bush_tilt_toward_big_oil/

It has been and always will be about the OIL.