Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Column: Drilled again
By Beau Elliot
The Daily Iowan, U. Iowa
July 15, 2008

Sometimes you just don't know, you know?

Or maybe it's just me. Who doesn't know, I mean. Of course, if I don't know, how would I know? Which can pretty quickly lead us down the serpentine slippery path to Donald Rumsfeld and we don't know what we don't know, and then there we are, in Iraq.

It all gets pretty Byzantine (to sidestep west several hundred miles, which is easier than it would seem, if you have a computer and a quick left hand) - which, we all know, thanks to the Cohn brothers' lifting a line from W.B. Yeats, is no country for old men.

Thank god none of us are old. (He said, carefully checking in the mirror for gray hairs. Hmm - none yet. Where are those pesky little critters?)

But sometimes you just don't know. Take - oh, I don't know - take the early reports after the flood that there was but 1 inch of water in the Adler Building basement. And then, a few weeks later, it turns out there was something more like 8 feet of water in that basement. I don't know about your universe, but in my universe, there's something like a large difference between 1 inch and 96 inches. (Something on the order of 9500 percent, my quick left hand and the abacus report.)

So, what gives? Somebody can't tell the difference between 1 and 96? Some reporter heard 1 when an official said 96? Somebody mistook the Main Library basement for the Adler basement? (Possible, once you recall that the national media seemed perplexed by the difference between the Iowa River and the Cedar River.)

Who knows? Maybe I'm just easily confused. (Possible - I seem to think there's a difference between your universe and my universe. Scientists would probably say we haven't evolved quite that far just yet.)

Or take our Cowboy in Chief. Oh, yeah, he's still around. No, he hasn't let Stealth President Cheney invade Iran yet. I hear one of his daughters got married, though. Maybe that's all the excitement he needs for a while.

Or maybe not. He did jump (with both silver feet in his mouth) into the skyrocketing-gas-prices brouhaha by overturning an executive order (signed by his father, no less - how's that for Oedipal?) banning offshore oil drilling on the U.S. continental shelf.

Our favorite Cowboy did this, he said, to relieve the price crunch at the pump.

(Well, yes, you're right - there's also a congressional ban on such oil drilling, so the Democrats in Congress would have to go along with him, which at this point they seem disinclined to do. On the other hand, those same Democrats - including Barack Obama [sheez, what Kool-Aid did he drink?] - cowardly caved in on the FISA vote last week, so who knows?)

One problem with the Cowboy's action is that it would take 10 or 15 years, if not longer, for any oil from such drilling to reach American refineries. Which means, of course, that the offshore drilling would have zero effect on today's gas prices.

Another problem is the conservative misconception that high domestic gas prices have something to do with supply and demand in the United States. They don't. There is a plentiful supply of gasoline in the U.S., oil officials say, and plenty of refining capacity, for that matter (with more scheduled to come online in the next 18 months). In fact, U.S. demand for gas will fall this year for the first time in 17 years (back when the Cowboy's father was president and the Twins were World Series champions - seems almost quaint, doesn't it?).

And another thing - U.S. oil companies reportedly own 40-some offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico that they're not using (apparently not on the U.S. continental shelf). If you want more oil drilling, why not push the oil companies to employ these leases?

John McCain resolutely backed the Cowboy's move, thus demonstrating yet again how different he is from George W.

Sometimes, you just don't know, you know?

Well, at least the Red Sox are in first place.

Beau Elliot admits that he doesn't really use a left-handed abacus. He actually uses a right-handed one, like normal people. We think that's about the only normal thing he does.

[ Back to Student Voices ]