When we lived in Austin, just before this immoral, undeclared disaster of a war on Iraq, I recall a counter-protester heckling anti-war protesters at the UT-Austin campus. He held aloft a sign proclaiming that he was looking forward to the cheaper gas prices neocons expected from the seizing of Iraq's oil supplies. But that didn't happen. As Big Oil reaps record profits, we're all expected to pay significantly higher heating bills. Gas prices have skyrocketed. Setting aside the appalling attitude that supports war and the murder of more than 100,000 human beings in exchange for the U.S. gaining control of Iraq's oil supply, I wonder: How can anyone be surprised by this?
W is an oil man. Big Oil sat in on Dick Cheney's energy policy meetings while conservation-minded groups were left out. And now the White House is keeping the amount of oil we're looting from Iraq a state secret. Why aren't we allowed to know this? Why is the extent of our theivery kept secret from us? If we found out, would we be appalled?
Bush was never, ever in this for the people; he was in it for Big Oil. And now that Big Oil is sucking away at Iraq and price-gouging us Americans, all the while reaping record profits, his pro-corporate, pro-oil, anti-individual leanings stand naked, crystal clear before us. Not even 24 hours passed between Bush proclaiming America addicted to oil and the White House statement claiming that he didn't literally mean any of the concrete-sounding fuel-modernization goals he'd mentioned in the state of the union address. He's lying so fast it's hard to keep up.
What did any of us think would happen? Did that idiot back in Austin really think Bush's oil war and Cheney's back-room dealings with the fossil-fuel industry were meant to help him?
Drive your gas-guzzlers, they told us, the American people. Consume in gross, disproportionate, greedy gluttony. It's the American Way, ex-White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer told us. This while Bush was conflating the terms freedom and free market, pretending that the two are interchangeable.
My fellow Americans, you have been lied to, and you have been screwed over, we have all been had. Particularly screwed are our troops, overstretched by this undeclared war.