While talking to Rush Limbaugh last week, and in his last minute campaign barnstorming for Republican candidates, George Bush confirmed his fear of Islamic extremists who “control oil resources” – and then immediately talked about “a country that doesn’t like us with a nuclear weapon”. You think maybe he’s thinking about Iran?
“Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you,” Bush said. “I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East.”
Bush said that he was “worried that rival forms of extremists will…be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West.”
“People say, ‘What do you mean by that?'” The president continued. “I say, ‘If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.'”
“You couple that with a country that doesn’t like us with a nuclear weapon, and people will look back at this moment and say, ‘What happened to those people in 2006?’ and those are the stakes in this war we face,” Bush said.
Limbaugh called Bush’s comments “extremely visionary.”
This strikes us as a very smart, cynical, and scary next framing for the Bush Administration – it IS about oil, and it has to be, unless you want to be blown up in a radioactive cloud and see your way of life to go out the window. We really want alternative energy too, (the Administration might say) but you can’t change overnight, and in the meantime we damn well better control that oil unless you want your kids praising Allah and glowing…
As the author of “Politics & Patriotism: The Fisk Conspiracy,” I made this point two years ago. Islamic extremists will use any mechanism that we are vulnerable to.
In recent days, we’ve seen reports on the major news nets about U.S. politicians who “accidentally” receive campaign contributions from extremist front groups. Where did they get the money to funnel through these legitimate pipelines? Oil.