Or maybe it depends on what the meaning of “political sociopath” is. As a bald-faced acknowledgement of the Leninist Liberal mind this* deserves wide attention:
…the correct liberal point of view is that high gasoline prices are actually a good thing for environmental and foreign policy reasons. Ergo, Democrats propose “legislation that would put a moratorium on the Federal gasoline tax for at least 60-days to provide consumers immediate relief at the pump,” but would also “chop oil company tax benefits and burden refineries with unwarranted reporting requirements, making it unable to win enough support in Congress to have even a remote chance of passing.” This accomplishes the political goal of making the Republicans unpopular — siding with their corporate masters to defeat a plan to lower the price of gasoline — while also accomplishing the policy goal of not making gasoline prices lower. That, to me, deserves the label “smart.”
Not that the GOP proposal of $100 refunds is any less cynically unprincipled, but this blatant Liberal amorality isn’t even original – it’s been Democrat strategy for 30 years. The evidence is stymied refinery construction, byzantine fuel formulation requirements**, opposition to “clean coal”, prohibition of drilling for oil in the United States, going NIMBY on windfarms (see also), and refusal to allow new nuclear power plants – the construction of which even Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, now admits is a good idea.
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
The populist pandering by all parties on energy issues is despicable, but the award for partisan reveling in it goes to Liberals by a neck.
* http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/04/post_220.html#002146X
This link is deliberately broken. I don’t want to promote traffic to that site from TOC. If you must confirm the quote, copy the URL and delete the final character.
** Ethanol mandates aided and abetted by both parties in order to please corn farmers, and to deliver corporate welfare to Archer Daniels Midland. This state of affairs is a poster child for the evils of Democracy, and tells you why the Founders established a Republic instead.
H/T OpinionJournal