House Speaker Pelosi: Too Ignorant, Too Greedy, Too Partisan

By Alan Caruba

Just as a democracy must fear leaders who might threaten our freedoms, we must also fear leaders who are so stupid or indifferent to the facts that it inflicts economic and other harmful effects on our lives.

I give you Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi!

Today, in the space of an hour, I received three news releases from her office and they are instructive and frightening. It is one thing to be partisan, but quite another to deliberately ignore reality.

Madame Pelosi: “For the first time, the price of oil has risen to more than $100 a barrel—almost four times the price when President Bush took office.” This assumes, of course, that the President of the United States has any control or influence over the price of oil, a global commodity whose prices are largely determined by mercantile exchanges responding to nothing more complex than supply and demand.

Pelosi is also assuming that Americans are unaware that, under her leadership, Congress has refused to permit exploration and extraction of oil in Alaska’s ANWR where billions of barrels remain untapped. Congress, in addition, has placed 85% of the nation’s continental shelf off the East and West coasts off limits to any exploration.

Claiming that the “New Direction Congress” passed landmark “energy security” legislation that included a “historic CAFE increase to boost fuel efficiency standards for our cars and trucks….” Pelosi ignores the fact that there is a finite amount of energy that can be extracted from a gallon of gasoline and even less if it includes an additive of ethanol, known in some circles as moonshine. The new standards defy the laws of physics.

To achieve these new standards, autos would have to be much lighter, i.e., even more dangerous to their occupants than today. The new standards will, if enacted, kill an estimated 4,000 more people on the nation’s highways.

She then promised that the continuance of “multi-billion dollar subsidies given to Big Oil companies” will be repealed. This is just brilliant. Subsidies for ethanol manufacture are okay. Subsidies for those selling airy, low efficiency wind power are okay, but the industry on which we all depend to provide oil for transportation and heating is to be deprived of its subsidies, further discouraging any exploration, extracting, or refining of the lifeblood of the nation’s economy.

She even wants to “pursue anti-trust actions against OPEC entities that fix the price of oil.” You can imagine how pleased they will be by that. Can one bring an anti-trust action against a sovereign nation? I think not.

In another January 2nd statement, Pelosi made it quite clear that she is unhappy with the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that individual States cannot pass legislation that requires higher clean air standards than the federal government. This is why we have a federal government! When was the last time she read the U.S. Constitution that allocates these powers to the federal government so that individual States do not create sheer chaos.

Finally, her office announced that she has managed to snag $82 million “to clean up Hunters Point.” That it falls in her district and will fund San Francisco’s “redevelopment plan” should come as no surprise. Why this isn’t an expense for which the city is responsible goes unexplained, but I am sure the citizens of the other 49 States will be delighted to know their taxes have been diverted to this project.

In three separate statements on the same day, Speaker Pelosi reveals herself to be appallingly ignorant and politically greedy.