ANWR as pawn in sick game
The following is an edited response of mine to a friend who sent along the usual Democratic Party-line handwringing note about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Senate voted to drill away in the ANWR - a realtively small portion of the public lands in the Refrigerator State on the oil industry’s wish list - in a 51-49 vote. The presumption is that this is the dastardly work of the nasty Republicans, who are being staved off by the righteous Democrats.
Interesting indeed considering that 3 Dems wouldn’t even protect the ANWR: Akaka-HI Inouye-HI Landrieu-LA… whereas 7 Republicans and the lone independent [elected as a GOP member] almost made up the difference by voting against their own party and the drilling. That’s how bad the Democratic Party has become: they can get that kind of boost on an issue they choose to grandstand upon and still lose!
This is my blanket response to the Donkey Party loyalists who see the ANWR vote as a black-and-white Endtimes issue, proof positive of the Big Differences Between the Parties:
Yes [I was aware of the vote and...] the fellow I ran against (a Democrat) voted to drill in the ANWR 4 times and probably will again.
Why? He gets a bit of oil (and coal and nuclear and
auto and…) industry money and people here will vote
for Any Democrat No Matter What so he has zero
incentive to do otherwise. People I talked to in the
street when campaigning went so far as to claim that
he *didn’t* vote that way even when I could provide
the bill numbers and vote dates for independent
fact-checking. I’ll say it a thousand times, but the
cognitive dissonance of Democratic loyalists is the
greatest danger to liberal change in America,
including and especially on majoritarian issues.All of this makes very little difference, considering
that the handwringing of a slight majority of the
Democratic leadership on this one only masks the much
larger Arctic oil grab that both parties have very
much been in agreement about. The Kerry website
during the election made it very clear he supported a
massive new Alaskan drilling effort in public lands
outside of the ANWR; this is a good article on some of
those areas.While saving the ANWR is nice, the push behind
protecting this pawn has benefitted the Republicans by
diverting attention from the larger grabs and making
them appear to be taking on the "tree huggers" while
the Democrats have used the AWNR to appear to be tree
huggers in the liberal eye, the facts be damned. The
major sell-out environmental groups, who rather more
protect incumbent Democrats than the environment, get
to pretend to be saving something. It’s enough to
make a decent citizen upchuck.I’m continually amazed that these little games
actually work for both parties, but they do. When
have the facts ever survived a collision with belief
systems?The National Forests and other public lands were
always there as private profit generators at the
public expense to begin with, as timber farms and
mineral sinks. At no time in the past 130 years of
this polluting rip-off system has either major party
attempted to change anything; 95% of the
representatives of both parties are on the take. You
could take the Dems seriously if, for example, they
attempted to reform the Mining Act of 1872 when they
had majorities in both houses and the presidency, but
instead Clinton used that time to let his buddies in
Weyerhauser escape prosecution (for theft from public
lands and dumping mill waste illegally) as well as plan to open Alaska to increased drilling.
