President George Bush has made another comment from foreign soil (Egypt) that doesn’t specify who he’s criticizing but it’s again clear who he means: he says don’t blame Saudi Arabia for America’s oil problems, blame Congress (which just happens to be controlled by the opposition party):
US President George W. Bush said on Saturday that a hike in oil output by Saudi Arabia would not solve American energy problems.
“It’s not enough, it’s something but it doesn’t solve our problem,” Bush told reporters in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Bush said he was “pleased” with a Saudi decision taken on May 10 to increase its oil production by 300,000 barrels per day in response to customers, but said that he was “also realistic” about what the Americans should do.
“Our problem in America gets solved when we aggressively go for domestic exploration. Our problem in America gets solved if we expand our refining capacity, promote nuclear energy and continue our strategy for the advancing of alternative energies as well as conservation,” he said.
Fair enough. And how could he open himself to criticism for that? It’s what comes next that could cause some ripples, although not as much as earlier in the week when he used the same rhetorical technique to swipe at Democratic Senator Barack Obama from Israel:
“One interesting thing about American politics these days is those who are screaming the loudest for increased production from Saudi Arabia are the very same people who are fighting the fiercest against domestic exploration, against the development of nuclear power and against expanding refining capacity.”
Who do “those” refer to? Bush often uses this rhetorical device (which Richard Nixon used quite frequently) of saying “there are those” without naming them.
What’s notable about Bush is that he is one of the few Presidents in American history who seemingly rejects the idea of the virtue of seriously working to build genuine bipartisan consensus on solving national problems. It’s almost as if he views bipartisan consensus and problem solving as weakness. It’s all divide and rule hot-button politics.
In fact, BOTH parties are to blame for not coming together over the years and putting aside differences and hammering out a short term plan and a long term strategy. Just insisting that ANWAR must be drilled doesn’t cut it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.