After pledging to work toward energy independence at a March 18 mid-Manhattan fundraiser, Clinton told an audience laden with Wall St. financiers that each time she switches off a light bulb in her own home, she mutters, "'Take that, Iran,' and 'Take that, Venezuela.' We should not be sending our money to people who are not going to support our values."1. The U.S. uses almost no oil to generate electricity, and the little that is used is the sludge left over from refining.
2. The U.S. does not get any oil from Iran.
3. If a country sells us their oil, they are very effectively supporting "our values," since we could not function without it.
4. Our second largest supplier of oil, Saudi Arabia, responded to the 1979 Iranian revolution by funding the extremist Sunni madrasas in Pakistan that bred the Taliban and its support of Al Qaeda. Yet by Clinton's implications, Saudi Arabia -- a backwards repressive monarchy -- supports "our values." Which must mean only that they don't care when we bomb anybody that doesn't jump when the U.S. president says "jump." Or it could be that a backwards repressive monarchy is our ideal as well -- we certainly seem to be heading down that toilet. The U.S. sells them our best bombers and keeps an aircraft carrier or two nearby to help them "support our values." (Our largest oil supplier is Canada. Third is Nigeria, where our values have supported the descent of that country from prosperity to a basket case of inequity and civil unrest.)
5. The values that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela represents are those of democracy -- speaking truth to power, daring to assert one's own voice as equal to that of the president of the United States, daring to assert the value of poor people and non-Europeans as equal to that of the self-anointed self-protective "elites." Those are values that Hilary Clinton -- along with almost everyone in the U.S. -- both lacks and fears. She may be more stupidly cravenly infantile even than George W. Bush himself.
