Common Sense Politics

We all have heard buzzwords from politicians over the many years since the invention of political slogans. Many of them have become bumper stickers as well and have been effective while others have been not so successful. Overall though, since they keep popping up, politicians and agenda driven people and groups must think of them as good population-opinion forming tools, otherwise, they would not waste time thinking up more.  Common Sense Politics looks into this political sloganeering.

We must remember that in the 2000 Presidential race, candidate George W. Bush was talked of in the media as “having no gravitas”, meaning him being a lightweight not ready for the job of President. And every liberal journalist and television host or guest in America repeated this particular reference to Bush for several weeks. They even concluded that the selection of Dick Cheney to be his Vice President was driven by the fact that Cheney had some ‘gravitas’ that Bush sorely lacked. Interestingly enough, this ‘gravitas’ requirement was never applied to John Kerry in 2004 nor is it being applied to Barack Obama, makes you wonder, right? A six-year Governor of the State of Texas did not have gravitas, yet a community organizer of Chicago and two-year U.S. Senator apparently has it.

In the fall of 2006, the Democrats ran on “It’s time for a change” and it was repeated ‘ad nauseum’ and so, people bought that and voted the Democrats back into power. Without going into details of what that ‘change’ has brought us, the latest answer by Democrats and their allies when it comes to the high price of oil and gasoline at the pump is now “We cannot drill our way out of this situation”. This is their standard answer to calls for increased domestic production of oil. Many liberals and Democrat politicians and their allies in the media to influence the thinking of the American people repeat it often enough and will probably convince many people who will buy this argument.

But unlike other such slogans, this one has major impacts on the American economy and also the American people. It is a well-known fact that Liberals, ergo Democrats, ergo environmentalist extremists are against the use of fossil fuel. If they had their way, we would all be selling our automobiles, ride bicycles or walk for the rest of our lives. But of course, they cannot openly say so, especially the politicians who want to get re-elected. So, they have to come up with other means to convince the American people to conserve energy, live with less, driving automobiles only as a last resort, i.e. in emergencies etc. This is naturally not selling and they have therefore complained about our dependence on foreign oil, the automobile industry for not building more fuel-efficient cars, let’s not forget to mention their favorite whipping boy, President George W. Bush and so on.

But now, that we are paying around $140 per barrel of oil which converts into a price of $4.00 plus per gallon at the pump, we have a crisis on our hands. One of the answers is of course to increase drilling for more oil domestically and the facts support that we have plenty of oil on the outer continental shelves (approx. 18 billion barrels of oil), the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) where there are about 10 billion barrels of oil and the oil shale deposits in the Green River Valley areas in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming where a reserve of 800 billion barrels of oil is retrievable. What is the respond of the Liberals/Democrats/Environmentalists response to this? The above-mentioned slogan “We cannot drill our way out of this situation”, meaning, let us not even try. A second response by these folks is the totally incorrect statement that it would take ten or more years to get a drop of oil out of these new drill sites.

This is absurdly false! If you ask anybody who has been involved in the planning, engineering and construction of such sites, he or she will tell you that it will be three years until oil is flowing. In some instances, it might even be less. The ten-year time frame is used merely by the opponents of domestic drilling to discourage this course of action and is therefore nothing but a scare tactic.

We here at Common Sense Politics have maintained for some time now - going back to January 2007 - that the very resolve of drastically increasing domestic oil drilling would send a message to the world, to OPEC and other oil exporting countries as well as all speculators that America means business, that we are as a people determined to do something about the current crisis and to actively pursue a course of action to bring down the costs of energy. America has taken on difficult tasks in the past and we can do it again! The question is: Will a vast majority of the people of America demand this course of action and therefore not buy into the Liberal/Democrat Party slogans? We believe, time will tell! It might take the price of gasoline to go up to $6.00 a gallon but we will reach the point where slogans and excuses will no longer be acceptable to the population as a whole. Supply and Demand is a concept that has been around and proven to be true for very long periods of time and it would work here too; it is time to apply Common Sense, take charge in this crisis and ignore the opponents. There is no question that switching to other energy sources in the future will become a reality. But this will not happen overnight and it will require a transition over more than a few years, it will probably require a few decades to reach that point where oil will no longer be the major energy provider in the world. Until then, let’s drill our way out of this situation.