We Were Right All Along

No, I haven't gone away.

As usual, I contribute to this blog when there's something nobody else is saying. Something obvious. Something people shouldn't be missing.

Like the truth behind the Strait of Hormuz.

The take from most pundits is that Trump's incompetence has handed the Iranian regime the knowledge that they have a, well, a Trump card. (And the delicious irony behind that phrase should be lost on no one.) They can restrict the world's supply of oil, and do so relatively easily and cheaply. Whether they were fully cognizant of this fact beforehand is somewhat debatable, but they certainly know it now. And this is all due to Donald Trump's incompetence. Instead of regime change in Iran, the theocracy is stronger than ever, despite being militarily depleted.

Now, I'm not one to negate the massive fault Trump bears for all this. Wrongway Peachfuzz has been running America into the ground for a total of six years, all the while with the madness of the Right Wing Media Machine assuring millions of dullards that he's somehow doing a fine job. But the real blame for the mess in Iran falls, not on Trump, but on someone else.

It falls on the oil empires. And the idiots in Right Wing Media who played along with the "drill, baby, drill" bullshit of the last twenty-five years.

Remember 9/11? If you're a millennial or younger, you might not. But I certainly do. I was a mutual fund accountant at the time the planes hit. When the towers fell, we all went home early. (I mean, with the stock market underneath tons of rubble, there wasn't much point in balancing the asset value of people's mutual funds, was there?) But what I remember most starkly about the world post-9/11 was the mantra, muttered everywhere, by everyone, that was spoken on virtually all lips, except President Bush's.

We need to stop buying the terrorists' oil!

Actually, we've been saying this since 1973! When OPEC's oil embargo sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin.

Fifty years. Fifty YEARS! And we still haven't learned?

Yes, if we wanted to defeat Isis, defeat Hamas, defeat the despots in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, we needed to get off the oil teat. And we needed to do it immediately.

Not only did we not do so, under "Dubya," we doubled down on our dependency on oil. Thus ensuring that, someday, somewhere, a situation exactly like the one we're in with Iran was inevitable.

And now it's here. The unavoidable consequence that Right Wing Media pundits everywhere told us would never happen: Some B.S. Islamist dictators now call the shots on the world's economy. And there doesn't seem to be any way around it.

If only the oligarchs of the U.S. hadn't killed the EV-1, and piled on with hundreds of other green-energy blockages, we wouldn't be touched by these Islamist fools, who are now pulling the levers of the world's economy with reckless abandon.

If only we'd committed more fully to solar and wind power, we wouldn't find ourselves in the same goddamned hole OPEC threw us down back in the 1970's.

If only the oil barons hadn't cock-blocked green energy, they'd be making SO MUCH MORE MONEY. Why? Because all the oil sold in the U.S. would be abroad, thus allowing all that money to be flowing INTO the United States.

Instead, we literally lit all that money on fire. We burned that money in the form of needless gasoline for decades more than we needed to. We STILL are! And for what? For Iran to grab hold of us by the short-and-curlys?

Was it worth it?

Dubya was a oil brat. He acted like an oil brat while he was president. And while it's abundantly true that Trump has completely ruined the economy, not only of the U.S. but the entire fucking world, we need to remember that the lion's share of the blame needs to go to the oligarchs who kept us nailed to fossil fuels when we didn't need to be.

Hell, the whole damned world could have been freed of fossil fuels, and with them, the tyranny of the Islamist dictatorships who rely on our dependence upon their black-colored heroin to survive.

If we truly cared about Israel, we would have gone green energy and denied the Arab/Islamic world the profits from their oil. And in so doing, Israel would have achieved peace without firing a shot.

If only...

And once again, we on the left have to say what we've been saying for fifty years:

We. Told. You. So.

Eric

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