The Republican Convention chant of "Drill, Baby, Drill!" just acquired an X-rating, with disclosure in a New York Times article that broke today detailing a wide-ranging ethics scandal at the Interior Department.
The investigation also concluded that several of the officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."
The Republican Convention chant of "Drill, Baby, Drill!" just acquired an X-rating, with disclosure in a New York Times article that broke today detailing a wide-ranging ethics scandal at the Interior Department.
The investigation also concluded that several of the officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."
You can find all the lurid details elsewhere. I just want to crow about the fact the timing couldn't be better with Congress set to debate drilling in offshore waters and the Republicans leaning hard on the drilling message for electoral traction.
Now what, Mr. Rove? I'll bet a memo's already gone out putting a kibbosh on the slogan, now that it's acquired a sexual connotation.
Which means this is just the moment for those in favor of a sane energy policy and climate action to take up the chant instead, and drive it home derisively. Drill, baby drill!
Wink, wink.
I was offended by the slogan when it first surfaced in a Wall Street Journal editorial. At the time, the slogan was merely "Drill, Drill Drill!" No "baby" then, a word whose insertion into the slogan last week was surely a sign of GOP cockiness.
I wrote about the slogan and the energy plan when it rolled out back in June in a post called The Misogyny That Fuels Global Warming. It was such a perfect uber-macho articulation of the ongoing rape of Mother Earth, and I was quite shocked and dismayed to see how much traction it got as the months went by.
Drill, Baby, Drill! It's a cruel philosophy of unrepentant extraction and combustion, and we are lucky we now have the chance to expose it's true meaning to this nation of so many hypocritical Puritans suffering from cognitive dissonance -- thanks to a sexual scandal, of all things.
I can't be accused of pointing to some symbolic or far-fetched metaphor anymore. Just look what those oil execs were doing to government employees! Go ahead. Say the four-letter word. That's what they're also doing to this country.
It's something the black community has known for decades, at least in the slang they used. According the Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, in the 1940s among black men, the meaning of the term "drill for oil" was "to have sexual intercourse."
Drill, Baby, Drill! Wink. Wink.
That's my new mantra now. Pass it on.
If there ever was an unexpected golden opportunity to sweep these oily scumbags out of power once and for all, this is it.