http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/06/06/237542/koch-oil-speculation/
Any thoughts of your own?
Yeah, I expect the Koch machine to be at full throddle in the fall of 2012. One way to sink Obama is the speculate oil through the roof, and sink the economy again. It is the Republican way.
Fair enough. Although if Republicans had that much control over the course of the economy, McCain would have won.
Obama also has painted himself into this corner by siding with the environmental extremists on drilling. Yes, the Gulf Spill scared everyone, but even it turned out to not be as bad as everyone predicted.
We need to invest and develop alternative technologies, but those technologies are years away. Right now, we need oil, and lots of it.
You do remember T Boon Pickings and the Swift Boat liars don’t you? With his money he was able to convince everyone that Kerry, a Vietnam decorated hero was some kind of fraud while Bush, the weekend warrior who only showed up with he was sober, was the military guy. Never underestimate the power or the influence of money in the GOP.
First, beginning explorations off the coast won’t produce significant quantities of oil for about a decade. Second, Obama allowed hundreds of offshore drilling permits in the months after the spill. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
Well, a couple things like that, at the risk of a relapse.
First, there were a lot of guys who served with Kerry who broke bad on him, which gave the whole thing a lot more credibility. Second, Kerry himself was being deceitful on the issue. He wanted to talk all about the 90 days he spent in Vietnam, and not mention the years he spent afterwards as an anti-war activist who slandered his fellow veterans as war criminals.
Kerry’s biggest problem on that issue was his own arrogance. Had he come out and said, “YOu know, a lot of what I did was insensitive to the brave men who served, when my real complaint was with the policymakers”.
Was Kerry a fraud? No. He got a lot of medals under dubious circumstances, but so did nearly every other officer over there. The military is great on pinning medals on officers, it’s like foreplay.
For Bush, well, the thing was, since most people of his age group found a way to avoid the rice paddies, the attack fell on the same ears as attacks on Clinton fell on the 50% of people who cheat on their marriages. Moralizing always has the problem of the fact that it can go too far.
Actually, snopes has a pretty good analysis of the Swift Boaters for Truth claim: http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/swift.asp
Most of the swift boaters for truth make statements of opinion rather than fact. Only one actually served with Kerry. It was a Madison Avenue smear campaign
Bush got out of the draft by a sweet reserve posting and there are virtually no records of him having actually served for most of it. Maybe most people of Bush’s tax brackets and parental power found a way to avoid rice paddies, but it wasn’t true for the majority. That said, it’s pretty obvious that Bush didn’t even do a decent job of fulfilling his reserve requirements. Unlike his father the WW2 combat vet.
Again, we end up with a draft dodger versus a military veteran and yet the spin makes black white and white black.
The main source of things against Kerry was swiftboater extraordinaire Marc Morano.
What is interesting to me is the connection he has with the current denialists of global warming and alternative energy sources.
Marc Morano now is one of the most vociferous voices in the effort to discredit environmentalists and climate scientists. Now, in what universe one can find that a misleading former “expert” on what took place in Vietnam like Morano has now respect as a climate science denier?
Only in the current Republican echo chamber universe.
On the actual topic at hand, Lee Fang (who wrote the article) has no idea what he’s talking about.
The Kochs do not speculate on oil. That’s a pure investment activity. What they do is buy it at low prices and hold it, in actual giant tanks they own, until somone wants to buy it. It’s most definitely not the same thing: the global supply chain desperately needs this service done, and if the Kochs didn’t, the refineries would have to. For various and sundry reasons, they choose not to. But the Koch brothers’ actions don’t change the price of oil. In fact, it actually smooths the price of oil. This kind of smoothing is a huge part of the modern economy, and it’s what keeps swings in oil prices to a point based solely on the underlying supply, and not how recently the giant tanker rolled up.
If you want to debate the policies favored by the Kochs, fine - although it’s stupid. If you want to pretend their some threats to republic, whatever - and hat involves, how do we say it, “highly selective” judgment. But people who know nothing about their business should not listen to other people who write moronic and content-free hit pieces
In other words, speculate.
Play with semantics much?
China guy, funny, I seem to remember Dan Rather claiming to have the “goods” on Bush’s Guard Service… Remind me how that one turned out again?
Kerry’s problem with the Swift Vets had a lot to do with John Kerry, not Karl Rove or Madison Avenue. He really thought he could sneak past on his medals (the ones he CLAIMED he threw back at Congress in the 1970’s) and no one would dare challenge him on it. Well, someone did. People who didn’t like being accused of murdering children 35 years ago and never forgave Kerry for slandering them in that way. No one was really all that mad because he claimed a Purple Heart for a superficial wound. they were mad because he got in front of Congress and said they were over there raping and murdering people.
As for all these claims about what Bush did or didn’t do in the guard, So What? Bush never ran on the platform “I’m running because I was the most awesome pilot of obsolete planes the Texas Guard ever saw”. He ran on the platform that he had been an effective Governor of Texas and had guided us through the war on terror. Now Kerry SHOULD have challenged him on that, absolutely. Especially the part where he started a war with Saddam who had not attacked us over weapons that turned out not to be there. But Kerry had a little problem… He was for the war before he was against it.
Bush got into the Guard. Not as bad as though who used Student Deferments (Clinton) fake medical conditions (Limbaugh) Marriage Deferments (Cheney, Gingrich). Reserve Service (Gephardt and Bradley). Lot’s of prominent people found ways to avoid service, and frankly, it was poor and working class kids who fought the war.
Boy, I sincerely hope that one day, the Vietnam War will finally be over.
I agree, they won’t. What they WILL do devalue the oil futures and reserves other people are holding by increasing the overall future supply.
What Obama need to do is be bold- propose sweeping new oil exploration, but also sweeping research programs for new energy sources. He talks all day about the “Green Technology”, but what has he really done to build it?
After the whole Japan thing, the world is starting to retreat from Nuclear Power, so that’s off the table.
Bush does not have a clear record of serving out his guard duty. Wiki’s take. He may have but very little evidence that he actually did. And 30+ years after the fact with incomplete records *proving *that he didn’t serve his obligation beyond a reasonable doubt was difficult.
So, basically, Bush didn’t show any evidence to prove he actually served out his Reserve obligation and the opposition wasn’t able to clearly prove he didn’t. Nice standard to hold a candidate and eventually President to. Not surprising how President Bush’s term turned out.
I was in the National Guard for 11 years (1981-1992), the last six of them as an active duty administrator (AGR). Records are routinely destroyed after a certain point, when they are no longer relevent. I’ve seen some of the records that do exist, and they look pretty typical for what I saw when I was in. (Yes, we enlisted scum used to peak at the OER’s to see what these idiots were saying about each other.)
My suspicion is, yeah, they had one set of rules for the officers and one set for the enlisted. So we can honestly say that the reason Bush and Kerry got away with stuff that would have gotten an enlisted man court-martialled or disciplined.
I also suspect that like a lot of guys in the Guard, it was a nifty idea when he got in, but six years later, he had a life and the Guard was crimping it. Very few people I saw actually served out their six years. Also, keep in mind in 1973, you had the draft ending, guys were getting out of the guard in droves, and guys coming back from 'Nam were trying to get in in Droves. Bush was an F102 pilot, but by 1973, the TXANG had decommissioned almost all their F102’s.
So why waste money on a guy like Bush who was leaving, and could only fly a plane that they were scrapping out, when they could use that money on a combat vets qualified on the planes they were getting from the Air Force? My guess is whatever happened was mutually agreed upon, and no one really cared that much.
Speaking of white washing, here’s a curious thing. Why are all of Kerry’s records and citations dated to 1978, almost a decade after they were issued? Could it possibly be that there was disciplinary action taken against him for his anti-war activities (he was still an officer in the Naval Reserve after he got back) that had to be “sanitized” when he got to Congress?
Now, again, Bush was a HORRIBLE president, and we are going to be paying for his incompetence for decades. But really, looking back, nothing I’ve seen indicates Kerry would have handled any of the problems any better.
Final point, I’ve always been curious about how people want to dissect Bush’s guard service. It would seem to me that what he did as a 20-something wasn’t all that important when he was a fifty-something who wanted to be President. People were willing to give Kerry a pass for hanging with Jane Fonda or Bill Clinton a pass for participating in anti-war protests in England, but somehow, they are all horrifically concerned about whether Bush showed up for “Weekend Warrior” duty?
Actually, I think it is quite relevant. Bush was an alcoholic that skated through life: Yale as a legacy, National Guard service based on his family and probably didn’t even pretend to do half of it, largely failed businessman with sweetheart deals, etc. It’s all a pattern of behavior that manifested itself as deciderer in chief. You yourself called him a horrible President.
Your humble opinion is that Kerry would not have handled the problems even better. IMHO, Kerry would have certainly been less disasterous.
Kerry hanging with Jane Fonda was illegal how? Kerry took a moral stand, even if it was for dubious personal reasons, and came out publicly against the war. Bill Clinton exercised his right to free speech and assembly in anti-war protests. Bush, very likely, didn’t even comply with the terms of his draft dodging despite painting himself as a “War President.” I don’t equate these 3 as being equal. YMMV
A lot of people felt what the protestors against the war did was effectively treason. We were at war, and they were siding with out enemies. And honestly, if Kerry was so proud of what he did back then, he should have invited Fonda to the 2004 convention instead of his war buddies. This is what got him in trouble, he was only trying to tell a part of his life story, and leave out the parts that were less than flattering.
If your argument is that he was a bad Guardsman, exactly what defines a good one? Frankly, what I saw in the Guard were officers who never would have made it past 0-2 in the real army, NCO’s who were promoted because they were there for a long time, and enlisted kids who were just there for a college education that never materialized. Heck, guys completing their six year terms was such a rare occurance in my unit I didn’t see it happen until I had been AGR for two years, and I had to actually look up what to do to close out the record.
And all the old timers said it was worse in the 60’s/70’s when the Guard was just a place for guys to avoid selective service. So, no, I can’t fault Bush for being less than stellar in a bad system.
I think Bush was a terrible president, but the question is, could we ever have a great one in the current system? I think Clinton was a terrible president, and frankly, Obama ain’t shaking up to be great, either. The Great Presidents lead, they didn’t take polls, they didn’t do focus groups. when we got into WWII, FDR initiated a draft, he rationed everything, and he let eveyone know that we had to make some hard sacrifices to do this thing.
Bush never asked for hard sacrifices from anyone but the people who signed up. I don’t see Kerry asking for those sacrifices, either.
And those people were on the wrong side of history. It was a bad war that we never should have been involved with, and accomplished little.
An awful lot more people believe that speaking out against the wrongs that our country perpetrates is more patriotic than being a blind sheep. The protestors were not siding with the enemy, but calling out the wrong that our own government was doing. It’s a false equivalency. Just like calling out that the eveidence for war with Iraq was dubious at best was not the same as siding with Sadam
Now, being an old soldier, I guess my problem is, the time to have these debates are BEFORE you send young men off to fight. Once you’ve sent them, you win it. Period.
Also, for who was on the “wrong side of history”. The argument for the war was that if the Communists won, they would do horrible things to the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The communists won.
They Did terrible things to the people of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
No wonder Jane Fonda and John Kerry hide from that kind of activity today. “Oh, yeah, I was on a swift boat…weeeeeee”
Speaking of Kerry, he was for the war before he was against it. Now, you would think with the supposed “lesson” he learned from Vietnam, he’d be dead set against a president advocating a war on weak evidence. But he wasn’t. He voted for the war. He realized he wouldn’t be viable in 2004 unless he was seen as a hawk. That is more contemptable than anything Bush did, IMO. Bush, whatever his flaws, did see Saddam as an evil. Kerry just calculated we’d make short work of him, and then he could go on hammering Bush on the economy (like they did to his father.)