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When
President Bush urged in his radio address over the weekend that
Congress “set aside partisan differences” and pass an energy bill that
will lower gas prices by reducing our growing dependence on foreign
oil, he was resorting to his administration’s SOP (standard operating
propaganda). To wit, never alter your fundamental policy, nor even
reveal it, but rather adjust the sales pitch till you come up with
something that gets you across the finish line.
The most
fulsome example of the Bush SOP, of course, was Iraq. The Bush hawks
had decided to topple the Saddam Hussein regime, no matter the cost in
lives, the damage done to our alliances or what the world thinks of us.
On the inevitable road to war, we saw Iraq’s (nonexistent) involvement
in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then the (nonexistent) weapons of
mass destruction put forward as justifications, before the
administration finally settled on liberating Iraq from the brutal
Hussein tyranny and transforming Iraq into a democracy. By the time
Bush settled on his democracy pitch, the unending occupation of Iraq
was accomplished fact. Now you can trace the same SOP taking place with
regard to the energy policy, which has passed the House of
Representatives and is before the Senate.
In its original form,
the National Energy Plan, authored in 2001 by the National Energy
Policy Development Group headed by Dick Cheney, was about increasing
energy supplies to attain “energy security.” Though the Cheney plan
paid lip service to the need to “modernize conservation,” whatever that
means, and “include renewables,” whatever that means, the basic sales
pitch warned of “a fundamental imbalance between supply and demand.”
“This imbalance, if allowed to continue, will inevitably undermine our
economy, our standard of living, and our national security,” the report
threatened. Yikes! We better step up energy production and electric
generation or else.
But by the time that policy was put into
legislation called the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the purpose had
changed to this coda: “To ensure jobs for our future with secure and
reliable energy.” Ah: a jobs bill. Not bad. Not bad at all. Not
exciting. Not lofty. Not unifying. Not informative. But better than the
menacing Cheney articulation, which, to be honest, didn’t scare
anybody. Jobs for the future, secure and reliable energy. That’s
something most Americans could probably get behind, even while they are
forking out record high prices for gasoline and being encouraged to
continue indulging a massive state of denial on global warming and
climate change. The jobs pitch is a positive spin on Bush’s cliched
argument that taking part in the Kyoto Treaty process to curb
greenhouse gas emissions would “damage the American economy.”
Now
Bush has apparently settled on the new pitch— maybe the final raison
d’etre for the energy bill: high gas prices and growing dependence on
foreign oil. There was a brief, strange moment in last year’s
presidential campaign that may explain Bush’s new reductionism. On
October 11, 2004, Kerry told a crowd, “In the last four years, the
amount of foreign oil we consume has risen to 61 percent…As president,
I have a real energy plan to harness the full force of America’s
technology and make this nation independent of Middle East oil in 10
years.”
He had no such plan, of course. But know what? Kerry
got the biggest cheers he’d had since the Boston convention in June.
And he started repeating that line. And people responded with wild
enthusiasm, and for a minute, or a day, it seemed as though Kerry had
captured the zeitgeist.
Bush knows that Americans want it all. Energy independence from foreign
oil and lower gas prices. He may or may not know they can’t have it
both ways. He should know they aren’t going to get either way. But what
does he care? There were no WMDs. Saddam Hussein didn’t do 9/11. Once
Bush signs the Energy Policy Act of 2005, he’ll be off to his next
mission accomplished.
It’s the SOP, stupid.
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