Ted Poe, 5 Jun. 2008:
Mr. Speaker, there are alarming events that keep occurring regarding crude oil spills that seem to go unnoticed by the environmentalists and the media. Off the gulf coast, and even off the sacred west coast of California, crude oil spills have become so noticeable that scientists can see the sources from satellites. Can you believe it? The culprit should be sued and brought to court because that is what the environmentalists do to save us from the nasty crude oil . The offender is Mother Nature.
This is gonna be fun.
You see, Mr. Speaker, thousands of metric tons a year of crude oil naturally seep to the surface in the Gulf of Mexico and off the west coast. Mother Nature is the cause of most offshore crude oil spills, and this must be stopped. Why don't we just remove all that crude oil that is seeping from beneath the ocean? That will eliminate oil from coming to the surface. The way to do that is to drill offshore , take out all that oil from underneath the ocean, and stop Mother Nature from polluting.
Congress needs to remove the silly offshore drilling restrictions to give us more supply. That will help bring down the price of gasoline, stop pollution, and we can teach Mother Nature a lesson or two.
And that's just the way it is.
In the interest of fairness, here's Barry Obama a few weeks before the spill happened:
I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.
For more quotes, I suggest searching the Congressional Record in the years when the offshore drilling debate was most intense. I'd say that would be between 2007-2009.
UPDTE: here's a link to Digg the Poe quote
http://digg.com/...