Is the White House using energy to collapse the system? That's the question that Glenn raised on radio today when reviewing some of the idiotic comments made by Energy Secretary Steven Chu. This is a guy who said that gas prices in the United States should be closer to the prices in Europe, and he has championed the development of green energy over exploring domestic oil.
Not long ago, Chu said he gave himself an "A-" when it came to his job performance. Then the other day, he was confronted in a hearing by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa who asked him if that grade still applied when it came to gas prices.
"Well, the tools we have at our disposal are limited but I would say I would give myself a little higher in that since I became secretary of energy, I've been doing everything I can to get long‑term solutions," Chu told him.
As Glenn put it, that's like saying you do well at basketball because you are working to develop a new type of ball that isn't ready yet and may never work, but if it does it will automatically go from your hand to the net. Meanwhile, you are destroying all the regular basketballs. Ok, Glenn isn't that great at sports analogies - but essentially he's saying Chu is focused on developing future green energy (which may never come) rather than find ways to make energy prices lower now. In fact, he is only making things worse. hoe does he deserve an "A-"?
Make sense?
Glenn also noted that he is asking for more "tools", a comment that will get overlooked with inflated, self-congratulatory grade Chu gave himself.
"He wants more tools. So when it gets worse and worse and worse, he's going to be pushing for more tools. Look, I can help control the cost of gasoline. You just have to give me the tools to do it. You need price controls, I need rationing, I need whatever it is I need, but I need more tools to be able to effect that," Glenn explained.
Wow, that sounds scary.
Couple that with Obama's comments about how we "can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times whether we're living in a desert or we're living in the tundra".
As Pat put it, the administration is trying to change our behavior and will nudge and push and eventually force us to do so.
"You change America. You change it by the behavior but you also are ‑‑ you're radically changing everything we've ever believed. You're changing us on what we can accomplish. If they get gasoline to be $5 and $6 a gallon, first of all, any time, any time you've had a spike in oil prices and a spike in gasoline, you have a recession or a depression because the market is not ‑ how are we built as a nation? How were we built? We were built with cheap energy. The reason why we could do things that others couldn't is because we always had cheap energy. So the entire system is built around that. So once you have $5, $6 a gallon gasoline, the system no longer works. This is a 'collapse the system' strategy. It's Cloward and Piven through energy, period," Glenn said.