It seems that bin Ladin made some pronouncements a decade ago about what he considered to be America's robbery of oil resources from Saudi Arabia. On Thursday, Anne Korin, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, testified to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs about bin Ladin's pronouncements. She titled her remarks, "Rising oil prices, declining national security."
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, about ten years ago, Osama bin Laden stated that his target price for oil is $144 a barrel and that the American people, who allegedly robbed the Muslim people of their oil, owe each Muslim man, woman, and child $30,000 in back payments. At the time, $144 a barrel seemed farfetched to most. Today, bin Laden is a mere $20 a barrel short of his target and there is little doubt it will be attained. I would like to impress upon this Committee that $144 a barrel oil will be perceived as a victory for the Jihadist movement and a reaffirmation that the economic warfare component of its campaign against the West is a resounding success. There is no need to elaborate on the implications of such a victory in terms of loss of U.S. prestige and our ability to prevail in the Long War of the 21st century. It is therefore imperative that the U.S. Congress do its utmost to forestall such a setback.
Deeply embroiled in a struggle against radical Islam, nuclear proliferation, and totalitarianism, the U.S. faces a crude reality: While its relations with the Muslim world are at an all-time low, more than 70 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and over a third of production are concentrated in Muslim countries. The very same Shi‘a and Sunni theocratic and dictatorial regimes that most strongly resist America’s efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East are the ones that, because of the market’s tightness, currently drive the world oil economy. While the U.S. economy bleeds, oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran—sympathetic to, and directly supportive, of radical Islam—are on the receiving end of staggering windfalls. In 2006, the United States spent about $260 billion on foreign crude oil and refined petroleum products. This year, with oil hovering over $125 a barrel, the figure could surpass $500 billion, the equivalent of our defense budget.
At today's prices, foreign oil producers are extracting a tax of more than $1,600 a year from every American man, woman and child.
Catch that? An oil tax. And I thought Dubya was anti-tax. Apparently, if tax revenues go to pay for rebuilding America's infrastructure, or to essential services like health care and public education, then taxes are bad. But if they go to prop up the Saudi royal family and to satisfy the stated mission of Public Enemy Number One, then they're okay.
OPEC, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, is deliberately keeping oil supply tight to prop up prices. Not only is Saudi production lower today than it was two years ago, despite the increase in demand, but the cartel has effectively deleted 2.4mbd from the global oil market in what amounts to an accounting scam. In 2007, OPEC expanded its member roster to include Ecuador and Angola – together the two had accounted for nearly 2.4mbd of non-OPEC oil. Yet, total OPEC production remained constant, allowing existing members to reduce production. This translates into a net reduction in non-OPEC supply with no equivalent increase in OPEC supply. This is equivalent to the production of Norway disappearing off the market . Further, while non-OPEC production has doubled over the last thirty years, as the graph below shows, OPEC production today is virtually identical to its production thirty years ago, even as the global economy has grown and with it demand for oil.
The flow of petrodollars from consuming economies to the coffers of producers not only casts a large shadow over America’s prospects of winning the war on terrorism but it also limits U.S. diplomatic maneuverability on central issues like human rights and nuclear proliferation. Perhaps the most powerful statement of the impact on America’s ability to accomplish its foreign policy goals came from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in April 2006 told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more, as Secretary of State, than the way that the politics of energy is . . . “warping” diplomacy around the world. It has given extraordinary power to some states that are using that power in not very good ways for the international system, states that would otherwise have very little power.”
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Oil’s strategic value derives from its virtual monopoly on transportation fuel. This monopoly, which gives intolerable power to OPEC and the nations that dominate oil ownership and production, must be broken. Not long ago, technology broke the power of another strategic commodity. Until around the end of the nineteenth century salt had such a position because it was the only means of preserving meat. Odd as it seems today, salt mines conferred national power and wars were even fought over control of them. Today, no nation sways history because it has salt mines. Salt is still a useful commodity for a range of purposes. We import some salt, so if one defines independence as autarky we are not “salt independent”. But to most of us there is no “salt dependence” problem at all — because canning, electricity and refrigeration decisively ended salt’s monopoly of meat preservation, and thus its strategic importance. We can and must do the same thing to oil.
I read this testimony and shuddered at the thought that bin Ladin has been clever enough to orchestrate, from wherever he's hiding, an operation to achieve his decade-old, secret mission to raise the price of crude oil.
Then I poked around at Google to learn all I could about this secret mission and discovered it hasn't been a secret at all. Lots of people have been writing about this. For years.
A correspondent for Al-Jazeera -- the Fox News of the Middle East -- named Jamal Abdul-Latif Ismail apparently interviewed bin Ladin in June 1999 and took great notes on his thinking. Five years later, writer Youssef H. Aboul-Enein wrote about the Ismail interview in the September-October 2004 edition of Military Review.
Ismail describes Bin-Laden's belief that America robs Saudi Arabia of its oil wealth. Bin-Laden explains that during the reign of King Faisal, the United States paid only 70 cents per barrel [of oil]. In the 1973 oil crisis, the Muslims asserted their economic power using oil as a weapon, and prices began to rise to $40 per barrel. When the [oil] prices leveled off to $36, the United States pressured Gulf countries to increase their production to lower prices.
Bin-Laden labels this "the great swindle." Doing basic math, Bin-Laden explains that from $36 the price was lowered to $9 per barrel, he relates the retail price at $144 per barrel, or a loss of $135. He multiplied $135 by the 30 million barrels produced in the Islamic world daily, totaling a loss of $4.5 billion per day for Muslim nations. He breaks down the loss over 25 years to $30,000 for every Muslim man, woman, and child. Although this is an oversimplification of petroleum production and evolution of agreements between oil companies and oil-producing nations, it is highlighted to demonstrate the skill with which Bin-Laden panders to the disenfranchised, giving them an alternate history.
Six weeks after September 11, one oil-industry newsletter explained how bin Ladin might pursue his goal of $144-a-barrel crude. The Octover 27 edition of Czeschin's Oil & Energy Investment Report offered this analysis:
"The US stole $36 trillion from Muslims, buying oil at unfairly low prices," says Osama bin Laden. "This is the biggest theft in the history of the world. I'm going to make America pay."
He doesn't need great technical sophistication or a lot of money to send the price of oil skyrocketing to his target price of $144 per barrel (about 6 times current levels). All he needs is what he already has in abundance -- a cadre of kamikaze terrorists.
To bring America to its knees, he wants to attack America at its point of maximum vulnerability -- its insatiable thirst for oil, which can only be satisfied with huge imports from the Muslim Mid-East. He knows his armies are no match for America. But that doesn't bother him a bit. His plan is simple: turn off the oil spigot and stop the flow of oil to America and its allies. To the American economy, that would be like cutting off its air supply.
....
Shutting the Strait of Hormuz, by itself, will shut off the oil spigot on 15.5 million barrels of oil a day. To put that in perspective, the US consumes 19 million barrels of oil a day.
Osama bin Laden thinks US$144 per barrel is the right price for oil -- and if he succeeds in closing the Strait of Hormuz or the other choke points, America's going to see oil at that stratospheric price. "If oil prices rocket to anywhere near US$144 per barrel, it will tear the heart out of the American economy."
If Osama bin Laden has his way and pushes the price of oil to US$144 a barrel, the shock to the American economy will be enormous. In 1973, when OPEC cut off supplies of oil, the price of oil quadrupled to US$10 a barrel, America fell into the worst recession since the depression of the 1930s. In 1979, oil went from US$10 a barrel to US$40 -- pushing America's inflation and interest rates to almost 20%. In 1991, a doubling of oil prices from US$20 to US$40, wiped hundreds of billions off the balance sheets of investors and threw America into another recession.
Today, America is already in a recession. To hit it not with US$40 oil (as in 1979 and 1991) but oil 3 to 4 times higher at US$144, is an economic doomsday scenario. America runs on oil. There's not a single part of America's economy that doesn't depend on oil. Just about anything sold in America is made or moved with oil.
Imagine gasoline at US$9 per gallon. You spend US$100 to fill up your two-door Honda, or US$270 to fill up your SUV.
The last time I filled my Toyota, I paid $3.69 a gallon and it cost me $55.50 to fill my 15-gallon tank. As it is, I doubt I'll be going very far to celebrate Memorial Day. If Bushgas gets all the way to $9 a gallon as this newsletter predicts, I doubt I'll be going much of anywhere unless it's within biking distance.
Then, Randeep Ramesh wrote about it in the October 17, 2002, edition of the British newspaper The Guardian, -- well before the invasion of Iraq, when crude was still $25 a barrel. In fact, Ramesh had some interesting insights on the potential effects of bombing Iraq:
The question of whether oil is worth spilling blood over has been quietly raised by the foreign office minister, Peter Hain. In a speech today to the Royal United Services Institute in London, Mr Hain notes that the cost of protecting the Middle East's oil reserves, paid for mostly by the US and without which the west would grind to a halt, is as high as $25 (£16) a barrel - about the same as it costs to buy. Mr Hain, seen as an outrider for Blairite thinking, goes on to warn that no amount of money will guarantee petrol supplies to the west and consumers should be weaning themselves off the black stuff.
The potency of the oil weapon is not lost on Osama bin Laden, either, who has stated that crude oil should sell at $144 a barrel - about five times the price at which it currently trades. The attack on the Limburg oil tanker off Yemen's coast may prove to be al-Qaida's first targeting of the global economy.
The Bush administration prefers not to discuss the economic effects of the war on terrorism as this could sap support domestically and abroad, especially in the Arab world where critics suspect, with good reason, the US of wanting to seize its vast petroleum riches. Instead the White House prefers to talk about imposing democracy and ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. These are noble aims, but they are undermined by leaks suggesting a bolder grab for oil riches.
Mr Bush's senior adviser on the Middle East, Zalmay Khalilzad, has pushed the idea of a post-Saddam Iraq as a colonial outpost of the American empire. Its large oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia, could be tapped more efficiently than at present and pay for the 75,000 troops required to administer the new Iraq. This both overestimates the ease of producing oil from a battle-scarred Iraq, which only manages to pump 1m barrels a day, and underestimates the risk of a global financial shock, a serious concern given that the last three big global recessions have been preceded first by a crisis in the Middle East followed by a spike in the oil price.
While bombing Iraq would not in itself cause the oil price to rise sharply, an attack by Saddam on Saudi or Kuwaiti oil fields or an uprising in Riyadh would. The loss of, say, 5m barrels a day of oil production cannot be made up quickly or easily. A big crude producer paralysed by revolution can see production fall precipitously because its workforce is out on the streets rather than manning the taps in the terminal. This is what happened in Iran during the 1979 revolution. Iranian oil production fell from 6m barrels a day to 3m and never recovered. If the same happened in Saudi Arabia, the world would see oil prices spurt upwards.
So if we knew that bin Ladin had this goal in mind, all this time, and we knew what his tactics might include, then why have we not focused our attention on finding him, capturing him, isolating him? Didn't he put bin Ladin and the Taliban "on notice," a la Bill O' Reilly, one week after the attacks?
PRESIDENT Bush said yesterday that he wanted Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile, "dead or alive" in some of the most bellicose language used by a White House occupant in recent years. "I want justice," he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed last Tuesday when an airliner crashed into the building. "And there's an old poster out West that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' "
The blunt, Texas-style rhetoric, delivered off the cuff, came a day after Vice-President Dick Cheney said he would willingly accept bin Laden's "head on a platter". Some advisers said that although the comments might be popular in America, they would not be welcomed by European or Arab allies.
Mr Bush indicated that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan would be punished if it continued to support bin Laden. "All I can tell you is that Osama bin Laden is a prime suspect, and the people who house him, encourage him, provide food, comfort or money are on notice. And the Taliban must take my statement seriously."
As he shook hands at a Pentagon cafeteria, a woman in a civilian dress began singing God Bless America quietly. Before long, Mr Bush and everyone else there had joined in. Mr Bush also met the pregnant wife of one of the Pentagon victims, hugging and talking to her before giving her a kiss.
What is there to say?
But didn't Dubya also say something about not resting until he'd been caught and brought to justice for September 11?
He sure did. In fact, two days after September 11, Dubya said, "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."
But five months later, perhaps fatigued from five months without rest, Dubya said on March 13, 2002, "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." In case anyone was confused, he reiterated for them, "I am truly not that concerned about him."
By his third presidential debate on October 13, 2004, Dubya was sufficiently rested to tell Kerry, "I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."
Exaggerations. The one thing that Dubya knows a lot about.
And since 2004? You know it's bad when Faux News mentions (on February 23, 2005) the absence of bin Ladin from Dubya's 2005 State of the Union Address, and quotes Ted Kennedy approvingly:
Just how many U.S. resources are being put into the search may be more difficult to ascertain these days. While President Bush mentioned the terror mastermind by name more than 10 times in his 2004 State of the Union address, bin Laden wasn't named once by the president during this year's address.
"It isn't the local Iraqis that are a threat to me in Boston," Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy recently told the Boston Herald. "It's Al Qaeda that is the threat to us here. It is unfortunate and tragic we haven't been able to apprehend him [bin Laden] after all this period of time."
Kennedy, a Democrat, noted the lack of mention of bin Laden in Bush's 2005 State of the Union address. "Why'd [Bush] mention [bin Ladin] one year ago 15 times? Now he doesn't mention him at all."
When asked in December how the search for bin Laden is going, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "The war on terrorism is much broader than any one person" but reiterated the theme that the Al Qaeda network has been smashed.
A month earlier, when asked if the United States was still actively looking for the ringleader, McClellan responded: "Yes, we are continuing to pursue him and he will be brought to justice. We are also continuing to move forward on dismantling and destroying the Al Qaeda network, and we have made great progress over the course of the last few years. But there is more to do. And we continue to stay on the offensive."
That Scott McLellan, a team player to the end. More than six and a half years after bin Ladin sent his emissaries to New York and Washington, and he's still at large, but Scottie had faith. Heckuva job, Scottie.
Speaking of that six-and-a-half-year era, has Dubya really gone without rest during that time, as he promised. Nah. But he HAS given up golf, because he thought it looked bad to the families of our 4,080 servicemembers killed over there, and the 30,329 servicemembers injured over there, for the grinning President of the United States to be chipping balls on the greens. Or so he has said. Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post says something different about all that:
The nation is in despair over the war in Iraq and the toll it is taking on our troops and their families. But President Bush shows no outward sign of inner pain. He is chipper in his public pronouncements. His weekly bike rides and daily workouts have put a perpetual spring in his step. He's always ready with a wisecrack. He just hosted his daughter's wedding at his multi-million dollar estate in Texas. He takes more vacations than any president in history. He has made clear that he doesn't lie awake at nights.
And yet now it turns out that Bush has indeed made a personal sacrifice on account of the war. According to the president yesterday, his decision to stop playing golf five years ago wasn't just an exercise in image control or a function of his bum knee -- it was an act of solidarity with the families of the dead and wounded.
Here's the relevant exchange in an interview Bush gave to Mike Allen of Politico:
Allen: "Mr. President, you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?"
Bush: "Yes, it really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
Allen: "Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?"
Bush: "No, I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing golf -- I think I was in central Texas -- and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it anymore to do."
This is the latest in a series of statements by Bush, the first lady and Vice President Cheney illustrating how far removed they are from the consequences of the decision to go to war -- and stay at war.
Adding factual insult to Dubya's injuries to the truth, Froomkin finds reason to question the Resident's resolve. Apparently Dubya made this momentous decision on August 19, 2003, but the AP reported two months later that he spent October 13, a "cool, breezy Columbus Day" playing "a round of golf with three long-time buddies.
"Bush played at Andrews Air Force Base with Clay Johnson, Office of Management and Budget deputy director, Richard Hauser, Department of Housing and Urban Development general counsel and another friend, Mike Wood."
On that outing, he was typically full of what passes for good humor at the White House. The AP reported: "'Fine looking crew you got there. Fine looking crew,' Bush joked to reporters. 'That's what we'd hope for presidential coverage. Only the best.'
"He hit a couple of practice balls before flaring his tee-off shot into the right rough."
Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post: "Democrats have criticized Bush for allegedly not requiring Americans to sacrifice enough while waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for urging people to keep shopping as a way to fight terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush was also widely criticized in August 2002 when he decried terrorist bombings in Israel while golfing and then told reporters: 'Now watch this drive.'
"Although Bush says he has given up golf, he is a mountain-biking enthusiast who has been photographed taking part in rides. He took up biking after an injury sidelined him from running.
"Presidential historian Robert Dallek. . . said Bush's remarks about Iraq 'speak to his shallowness.' Dallek added: 'That's his idea of sacrifice, to give up golf?'"
Yeah.
So after all those butch pronouncements back in 2001 and 2002 about finding and bringing bin Ladin to justice, Dubya turned the entire might of the American military and economy toward Iraq, neglecting the Taliban until they're effectively back in power in Afghanistan, and leaving bin Ladin to move closer and closer toward his dastardly goal. Why is Dubya so beholden to the Saudis, and so namby-pamby when it comes to bin Ladin? I don't know the answer. Does anyone?
"Ours is a season of obscenity and absurdity," writes Lance Hames, a write-in candidate who offered his own "State of the Union" address online. "Currently, we have in the White House an alcoholic who failed at every business venture handed him, by his family, and by their lofty connections, friends in the oil industry, the Bin Laden family, and the royal family of Saudi Arabia, someone who was unable to find oil in Texas with infinite pools of funding."
And as we fumble on in Iraq, in the fight, and in the futility, we say nothing of our fair-weather friends the Saudis, a feudal monarchy we finance with the worship of our gas-guzzlers, two-faced fanatics who take the tithe we offer and finance schools of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, whose scholars teach their students to hate all things American except our cash.
And no one in the second Bush White House wants us to remember that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 murderers were Saudis.
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And while the dying continues, and the light at the end of that tunnel dwindles, and our own President spends a billion of our dollars in Iraq every week to drive up the price of oil for his friend in the Petroleum Industry, we the people, in our conversations, in our coffee klatches, at our café counters, in our closed circles and our open opinions, complain of mothers on welfare, and the rising cost of the health care system we insist on keeping. We complain government is too big, not the corporate interests who control it.
While ExxonMobil, who controlled environmental policy for the second Bush Administration, posts a profit of $39.6 billion for 2006, $40.6 billion for 2007, a record for any corporation, we bitch about the price of gas, knowing we will do nothing, not even in the Spring, when the price will jump to greet the tourist season, when the oil monopolies will take it to $4 a gallon.
And Osama Bin Laden, our true enemy, an actual evil, remains at large, at leisure and on the loose, even after all the torture and wire-tapping, even after the execution of his hapless surrogate boogeyman, Saddam Hussein.
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We've seen the price of oil skyrocket, environmental warnings have been ignored to facilitate that rise, our national debt and our annual deficit have soared, hundreds of thousands of jobs have been shipped overseas, and health care costs have climbed as fewer Americans can afford them, and the examples of other countries with universal health care are ignored.
In essence, thanks to Dubya's earnest incompetence, or his malevolent neglect, or his active collusion in bin Ladin's nation-crippling scheme, the mastermind of September 11 is on the brink of achieving his longtime goal. Is this another case of the Lucky Enemy Syndrome -- like Tip O'Neill enabling his fellow Irishman Ronald Reagan's thirst for Pentagon spending, or Newt Gingrich flailing against the intellectually and politically superior Bill Clinton? Except in this case, it's bin Ladin who gained the upper hand when the Rehnquist Court installed their boy, the ultimate clueless cowboy, in the White House?
Of course, I'm not absolving the dark half of that package deal, Chancellor Cheney.
There's a little something obscene about the prospect of bin Ladin accomplishing his mission sometime between America's Memorial Day and America's Independence Day, two of the high-holiest days in the patriot's year. (Might it happen smack-between the two, on June 14, our Flag Day?) But asking Dubya himself whether the hunt for bin Ladin is still the "priority" it once was is a fool's errand. In less than eight months, it won't matter to him anyway. The charms of his Prairie Chapel Ranch await him, and he has a library to build at Southern Methodist University.
He intends to raise $500 million for his library -- making it the most expensive presidential library to date, surely a new definition for "supreme irony" -- which has real librarians howling: Says one, "The half-a-billion dollars is twice the total amount Bush spent on his entire 2004 Presidential campaign! Just think if public libraries had that kind of kind of support while he was in office."
Don't bring that up to Dubya, though. He's got things on his mind, or he did on May 3:
MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. — President Bush on Friday touted his planned presidential library at SMU as a forum to promote freedom, brushing aside critics who say it will operate as a partisan venue. “This isn’t a political precinct, this will be a place where we get the thinkers from around the world to come and write about and articulate the transformative power of freedom, abroad and at home,’’ Mr. Bush said.
The SMU project, now being designed, will be composed of a library, museum and public policy research center.
The president, taking questions from employees at a technology plant in suburban St. Louis, said the center will help foster democracy around the world – what he called the “freedom agenda.”
“It’s going to be very important to be kept in the forefront of American philosophical thought,’’ he said.
Never a fan of discussing his legacy, Mr. Bush said after all the good days and the bad days in the White House he remains optimistic. “Interestingly enough, it is a lot harder to have been the son of the president than to be the president,” he said. “And so it’s been a joyous experience.”
Mr. Bush headed to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for the weekend after his speech. “I’ve got a lot on my mind, by the way,” he cautioned the crowd. “I’m getting ready to march down the aisle.”
The president’s daughter Jenna is getting married next weekend.
Oh, and have you heard who Dubya's soliciting for contributions to the building of his library at SMU? I'll give you a hint: They're not Southern, and they're not Methodist.
In late-November, the New York Daily News reported that "Bush sources with direct knowledge of library plans" said that "Bush fund-raisers hope to get half of the half billion from what they call 'megadonations' of $10 million to $20 million a pop." According to the Daily News, "Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential 'mega' donors and are pressing for a formal site announcement - now expected early in the new year...The rest of the cash will come from donors willing to pony up $25,000 to $5 million."
While the donors to Bush 43's library will remain anonymous, in February 2006, the Associated Press reported that among the donors to Bush 41's presidential library located at Texas A&M University in College Station, were a sheik from the United Arab Emirates, who contributed at least $1 million, the state of Kuwait, the Bandar bin Sultan family, the Sultanate of Oman, King Hassan II of Morocco, the amir of Qatar, and the former Korean prime minister. China also gave tens of thousands of dollars to the library. In addition, funds were received from the late Kenneth Lay, the former head of Enron, and Dick Cheney, the current Vice President.
"Presidential libraries," the Daily News pointed out, "are run by the National Archives and Records Administration, but building costs must come from private donations. Bells and whistles, like an institute or an academic program like Bush's father's public service school at Texas A&M, are also extras."
The really big extra embedded into this project appears to be what Bush insiders are calling the Institute for Democracy. Modeled after the Hoover Institution, a long-time conservative think tank located on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Bush's institute would hire conservative scholars and "give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President's policies," one Bush insider told the Daily News. This would effectively be the post-administration version of a policy they established during his reign - paying columnists to advocate for administration policy.
So the same Middle Eastern interests who nurtured bin Ladin, who have controlled the petroleum economy for forty years, who have played games with the Bush family and its various corporate connections, who funded the elder Bush's presidential library in Houston and who now hold America's economic cojones in a vice-grip are going to pony up to the tune of millions to give the Boy King a gilt temple in which supplicants can worship his monkeyish legacy and eminence for generations to come.
And on the campus of an institution of higher learning. Where, likely, Dubya himself couldn't honestly earn a degree of his own, even if he majored in his own legacy.
Is there no one at SMU who could or would stand against this injury to logic and reason?
Maybe there is.
FORT WORTH, TEXAS (AP) -- Some ministers will use a PR campaign to try to stop George W. Bush's presidential library from being built at Southern Methodist University. Opponents have hired a Maine public relations firm to design ads for Methodist publications.
The Reverend Andrew Weaver of Brooklyn, New York, says the goal is informing people about the center's partisan think tank. Weaver says some Methodists believe Bush policies -- like the war with Iraq and torturing foreign prisoners -- conflict with church teachings.
Critics are launching the campaign before July's meeting of the United Methodist Church's South Central Jurisdiction, which owns the land for the Bush complex. Last year a smaller church council authorized SMU to lease land to the Bush Foundation for the spread.
SMU officials say that's all the approval needed.
More power to them, if they're able to stunt this mutation before it takes root.
But I think all the prayers in the Crystal Cathedral won't stop Osama bin Ladin from reaching his goal of $144-a-barrel oil soon. It's clear that our president won't.
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