Dead-Tree Opinions

Right after I give up looking at TV commercials, I'm gonna stop reading the Ed and Op-Ed pages of the local garbage-wrap.

Froma Harrop -- who can be relied up to follow the more-or-less American Left's Party line as reliably and smartly as Soviet troops in a May Day parade -- this mornin' uses her column-inches to bemoan the horrid awfulness of both Presidential candidates endorsing drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Don't those poor fools know, she frets, that DOE says we couldn't get enough from those sources to make a difference until 2030? --Forgetting two salient truths: A) we're unlikely to have replaced hydrocarbon fuels with pink unicorn flatulence in 27.5 years and B) oil prices are not straight-up supply-and-demand driven. Like any really big-money commodity, news about readily-available supply and new-found possibilities affect crude-oil prices. (At the consumer end, our usage does impact prices; this is one reason why prices dipped a bit in recent weeks, as people changed their use to accommodate $4-a-gallon gas; but it's not the whole story).

She puts on a stylin' Rachael Carson hat and goes on to cite a geniunely bad spill off California -- nearly 40 years ago -- as another reason not to drill. Yeppers, 'cos A) it'd be too, too much to think biz has learned one or two things since then about preventing spills and cleaning up the few that still happen (in Froma's world, all technology is static unless she approves of it). And B) she must not care what happens those icky rednecks and worse in Texas and Louisiana, where offshore drillin' is okay; of course, they never get any bad weather in the Gulf and would know nothing of the hazards of a real ocean, right, Froma?

She rounds out the hand by draggin' the global warming boogyman out from under the bed -- Ooogabooga! Fire BAD!* -- then coming up with a fifth ace in the form of how "it feeds the public's delusions," which is to say that news of possible new supplies would never possibly affect prices. (Tell all the commodity-futures traders to pack up and come home, The Harrop Hath Spake). --I guess when the only economics you know are those of a command economy, that would look like sense.

Give it up, kid. That ship has done sailed -- and your Presidential candidate hopped aboard as the gangplank was going up.


Meanwhile, over on the other page, Jonah Goldberg takes time out to talk sense, using the recent death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Peter Rodman as a springboard to channel George Santayana to point out communism's harrowing death toll and working from there to the way the American Left continued to snuggle up to 'em even as the USSR and its satrapies went to bits -- but now looks back and credits their own supposed hand-holding, togetherness and positive thinking with the win, citing Senator Obama's recent speech in Berlin. --Yeah, geez, thanks for nothin'. Thanks for turning "human rights" into a codeword for "ignoring the bad stuff the commies do." Thanks for looking shocked and horrified when President Reagan called a wicked hegemony "The Evil Empire" while you glossed over their millions of victims in the name of international chumship. That was good of yez, y'slimy weasels.

Yeah, once I get the TVs Elvised, I'm gonna start buying blank newsprint in bulk for the catboxes. Any day now. ...Just let me read this one last article...?
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* Hey! Dag-gone it, you're supposed to cower when Authorized Journalists do that. C'mon -- Cower! And stop snickering. Geez. I'm so proud.