Help is on the way (to America's enemies)

Too bad about the threat to your life

By Wes Vernon

If you're feeling a sudden excruciating pain in your back, you can be sure the label on the knife embedded there bears the names of five Republican senators who are part of the "Gang of Ten." It isn't just a matter of what you're paying for gas in your car. The overriding concern is that this is a gift to America's enemies.

The GOP contingent in the "Gang of Ten": Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), John Thune (S.D.), and Bob Corker (Tenn.). They endorse a surrender bill on the issue of oil drilling.

In so doing, these GOP senators are undercutting the heroic efforts of their fellow Republicans in the House to shame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats into allowing an up-or-down vote on drilling for oil the on Outer Continental Shelf.

Queen Nancy, feeling the political heat, said in a TV interview and again in a radio talk this past weekend that she is willing to allow a vote on that, but she stopped way short of promising a stand-alone bill with no poison pills. If you don't think there are some caveats, booby-traps, ifs, ands, buts, and maybes in that throw-away "promise," you just don't understand Pelosispeak. Madame Speaker is trying to get the monkey off her back without giving an inch.

What is at stake here — let us connect the dots

The House Republican effort is not merely a trivial cutesy political game to knock off Democrats in the fall (although given what the Dems are doing to middle class Americans, that in itself would be a worthy goal; Americans take what amounts to a pay cut every time they "filler' up").

Nor is cheaper gas on the way to the beach or the mountains or the supermarket the ultimate goal at stake here (although that too legitimizes the House GOP endeavor).

Not just pocketbooks — but our very lives.

No, the House Republicans' daily talkathon on the House floor is also linked to avoiding nuclear terrorism aimed squarely at the United States — you and me; it can't get any more personal than that.

As Pelosi and Co. throw roadblocks in the way of U.S. energy independence, Russian jets have targeted a key oil pipeline to (the nation of) Georgia (a valiant ally of the U.S. and the West), so as to give the old KGB cutthroat Vladimir Putin a stronger stranglehold on Europe's energy supplies.

And bear in mind that Russia, despite repeated pleas from the West, has been arming Iran to the teeth, while the Iranians go their merry way building a nuclear capability to attack — not just Israel — but also the United States.

Pesky realities

President Bush apparently has stopped looking into Putin's eyes and is instead looking into what the Russians are actually doing. Russia's current quest at reviving the Cold War — this time without the burden of having to enforce the discredited ideology of communism — has been on display for a long time.

Years ago, then-Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) — who speaks fluent Russian — obtained a Russian national security memo that identifies the U.S. as "the main external force potentially capable of creating a threat to the Russian Federation military security and to Russia's economic and political interests."

Investigative reporter Ken Timmerman, author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran has written that Russia has "authorized Russian missile experts to travel to Iran to work on jointly developing a new generation of nuclear missiles for Iran." Iran and Russia have signed "a secret nuclear cooperation agreement," Timmerman notes.

How this relates to our need for energy independence

So let's add up the security threat in this disaster:

The House Republicans are pushing for true energy independence so that we won't need to go to Middle East despots and say, in effect, "Please Mr. Despot! Please sell us more oil so we won't have to drill, and so that the Sierra Club will smile benignly on us. Pretty, pretty please?"

With that humiliating absurdity in the background, the House GOP's campaign to "Drill here, drill now" aims at leaving us fortified against nuclear blackmail. Russia is aiding the worst of those Middle East despots — Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We should position ourselves to tell the tinpot he can keep his stinking oil — that we have our own.

About the "compromise"

The so-called energy "compromise" agreed to by the Senate's "Gang of Ten" (5 Republicans, 5 Democrats) is not a compromise at all. It is abject surrender to the "freeze-in-the-dark" lobby — i.e. those who have abandoned the discredited word "Marxist" and have papered it over with the more feel-good moniker "environmentalist."

This foot-dragging Senate plan, according to the astute analysts at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), would: (a) leave new production of federal offshore lands to the states, (b) severely limit production potential, with only four coastal states permitted to "opt out" of oil-drilling bans, (c) place potential resource deposits off-limits because of an arbitrary buffer zone, and (d) ignore the urgent national need to repeal bans on offshore exploration and production.

Bottom line: The Senate Gang of Ten "compromise" is a betrayal which would — according to IER — "prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for thirty years."

Letting Dems off the hook

The Gang of Ten is coming to the rescue — but not to your rescue. The Senate functionaries of the stupid party (the GOP) have helped craft a roadmap whose political effect — in addition to providing cover for Pelosi and Harry Reid — may be to bail out the one and only Senate Democrat incumbent whose re-election is threatened this year.

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) is in hot water back home because of the energy crunch. Louisiana is an oil state. Louisianans are hammering her without mercy because her party has put severe limits on drilling. Landrieu is one of the five Democrats in the "Gang of Ten." Her own campaign committee could not have devised better timing for this political cover handed to her by nine of her colleagues, including the five Republicans listed above. She thinks you're stupid and can't see through this elaborate fakery.

The gift extends to the Democrat Party as a whole. As Kimberly Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal, "Sen. Obama was thrilled [with the Gang of Ten handiwork]. He quickly praised the Gang's bipartisan spirit, and warmed up to a possible compromise."

That is code language for saying Barack Obama hopes to make the proposal even worse.

House Republicans betrayed

Principled House Republicans gave up their five-week paid vacation to take to the House floor each weekday to demand that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (see last week's column "Stalinist Tactics back Pelosi's jihad against oil drilling") call the House back in session to help Americans who are foregoing their vacations because they can't afford to pay for the gas.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) is not thrilled with the action of his fellow (U.S. state of) Georgia Republicans (Senators Chambliss and Isakson). The congressman puts it this way:

"While I respect our senators' desire to find legislation that reaches consensus with Senate Democrats, the American people are more interested in lower gas prices than Senate procedural pleasantries. For far too long, this Congress has accepted 'compromise' energy legislation, and look what it got us — $4 gasoline."

And look what else it may yet get us — nuclear blackmail that brings America to its knees under threat of a terrorist attack. But the fat pooh-bahs of the "freeze in the dark" lobby aren't paid to worry about that.

© Wes Vernon