The one rule the Bush Administration tried hard not to break was a simple one:
Never tell the truth.And they didn't. Go on back and look at virtually every thing they did or tried to do, and you'll see now that they lied about it first, then told more lies about it later. Every effort they made to change policy started with a deception, a deception which was adjusted as necessary in order to get what they wanted.
This one really pisses me off. There is such a thing as a purpose-built
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the Bush Administration paid top dollar to fill up during the oil crisis they created. At full capacity, the SPR can keep the U.S. going at current consumption for just over a month.
But when the idea was conceived, it was acknowledged that the
real reserve was the preservation of U.S. reserves
still in the ground, in other words, leaving the few good remaining oilfields on U.S. soil dormant, for that rainy day which is sure to come.
This is a national security issue. There is no nation on earth that wants to go toe to toe with the U.S. militarily. That means that enemy nations will almost certainly seek to avoid fighting and instead bring the U.S. to heel by strangulating its source of oil. It is a fundamental rule of conflict that the winner almost always wins by exploiting the weaknesses of the enemy, not by confronting its strengths. Our weakness is our energy reserves.
The Bush Administration didn't give a damn about that. They worked hard to crank the per-barrel price of oil up high enough that domestic producers in the lower 48 states could profit by extracting the trickle of oil that still flows from our spent wells, and for seven years that reserve was squandered for the personal profit of a few thousand landowners.
But it turns out they were also lying about Alaska. Oh, not a little white lie, no. Republicans don't think that way. No, they
exaggerated their estimates of Alaska's oil reserves by
one thousand percent, ten times.
The current state of the lie is that "new data" was added to come to the estimate. But if anyone looks into it closely, it won't be long before we'll find out that the USGS knew the whole time, and that the Bush Administration stepped on the results because they had to pay off someone by trying to rape the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.
Those inflated estimates were certainly used by the Department of Defense for virtually all of the past decade to project what would happen in any one of dozens of theoretical long-term wars including the several we're fighting already...
...Which means that the state of U.S. national security is totally changed, overnight, for the worse, because of a lie told to specifically make it easier to further reduce the security of our nation, for someone's personal profit. Everything we thought we knew about our energy reserves is a lie. And now we'll have to scramble to find a new defense policy that actually incorporates that uncomfortable reality.
Think about that the next time you hear some drone railing about how Democrats are weak on national defense. The ones who are saying that are the ones who
severely endangered American national security for a little bit of money.
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