Bob Herbert quotes JK on energy crisis

[MBS]

Bob Herbert has been outstanding during this election cycle-- topic after topic, essay after essay, he just nails it, time and time again.

Today he nails the energy crisis, AND quotes JK as his main source. Kerry and Herbert -- my two favorites,both brilliant as usual, together!! A dream come true:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/opinion/12herbert.html

Excerpts:

Senator John Kerrywas on the phone and the words were coming in a rush.

“It’s a completely fraudulent argument,” he said. “It’s misleading. It’s snake oil salesmanship of the worst order.”

He was talking about the latest smoke screen in the presidential election, the bogus contention that lifting restrictions on offshore oil drilling would somehow, in the foreseeable future, bring down the price of gasoline for American motorists.

This absurd contention is now one of the main issues of the campaign. . . .

Senator John McCain told cheering bikers at a giant motorcycle rally in South Dakota: “We’re gonna drill offshore! We’re gonna drill here, and we’re gonna drill now!” He told an audience in Lafayette Hill, Pa.: “We have to drill here and drill now. ... Drill here and drill now.”

With Senator McCain and the Republicans painting a false portrait of drilling as a method of relief for today’s high prices, and with polls showing the G.O.P. gaining traction on this issue, Senator Barack Obama has eased off his previous opposition to new offshore leases.

And so dies the possibility of the presidential campaign offering any real clarification of this important issue.

As Senator Kerry and many others have pointed out, it would be nearly 10 years before any oil at all would be realized from new offshore leases. So your adorable 7- or 8-year-old would be just about 17 and clamoring for a license when this new oil started coming online.

. . . .

Public officials should be disabusing the electorate of its delusions, not encouraging them. . .

I wonder if the electorate will ever wise up. We’ve known, or should have known, since the 1970s that the day of reckoning on energy would come. The U.S., blessed with so many resources, is no longer blessed with an abundance of oil.

Jimmy Carter, for all his faults, was on the case when it came to energy. He saw the challenge as “the moral equivalent of war,” and dared to ask the public to make sacrifices as part of a coordinated national effort.

Senator Kerry, in accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 2004, said: “Our energy plan will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East.”

Former Vice President Al Gore has tried, more than any other public figure in recent years, to raise the consciousness of Americans . . .

How pathetic that in the midst of a presidential campaign the loudest voices we are hearing on this subject are crying: “Drill! Drill! Drill!”