Hello?

by digby

Not that logic has played even the smallest role in the current debate on drilling, but this really seems like an important point, at least politically:

While the U.S. oil industry wants access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries. A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month, according to final numbers from the Energy Department.
The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. “We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country,” President Bush told reporters this week. “We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home.

I think most of you who are reading this know that we are dealing with a world market in oil and that this whole argument is brain dead. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so depressing to have “drill, drill, drill” be such a success. But it seems to me that this would have been a good line of attack against McCain, even though it’s equally stupid: “why are the oil companies selling off our good American crude to foreign countries when we need it so badly?”

I hate having to fight dumb with dumb, but it may be the better choice than to allow the Republicans to have the upper hand — or at least be able to neutralize their whorish fealty to the energy lobby — by being allowed to blur the differences on this issue. (Even the NY Times has gone over to the dark side on that, even though Obama’s energy plan is vastly, vastly superior to the energy company giveaway that McCain’s put out. ) Going along with this fiction that drilling “our own oil” will do anything to lower gas prices seems like the worst of all possible worlds.

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