REPLAY: “Our Imperial Speaker”

Sunday, September 14th, 2008 12:10 am by Neal

Here’s a replay of an article we wrote last month on Nancy Pelosi and her failed Congress. It’s still relevant. Enjoy.

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Nancy Pelosi is out-of-control. Drunk with power, she has betrayed every ideal she claimed would mark “the most ethical Congress in history.” Worse, she has decided that the People’s House is her house, and that democracy and debate are irrelevant because she alone can decide what energy policy is best for the country.

Timothy Birdnow has a great article at American Thinker entitled Political Power Flowing from the Pump:

Granted, Madam Speaker is often in the dark herself, but the great irony here is that she used her control over energy to stifle a debate about increasing energy supply.

One wonders if this display of power is not illustrative of a deeper malady; a lust for control that transcends the normal political power wrangling between parties. Control energy and you can control people. Nancy Pelosi used her power over the lighting system to silence her political opponents.

What are the basics, the fundamentals that a civilization requires? Food, clean water, shelter, clothing, transportation, heating and cooling, sanitation, lighting, are some of the major necessities that people need to survive and prosper. Then there are the many luxuries; telephones, televisions, computers, etc. What is the common thread? In all cases, everything we have, our very civilization requires energy. Every scrap of food, every stitch of clothing, every erg of heat, every shelter, even our sewers and drainage ditches require energy to make or to operate. …

That control is something those in government are loath to surrender, and this returns us to the original point of this essay; the Democrats, beholden to Big Environment, want to keep our energy resources under lock and key. Part of their purpose is to reward high dollar donors, but part of it is to maintain the kind of control that powerful people crave, and that reformers in particular lust after.

Oil is the lifeblood of the post-modern era, and there isn`t a grain of food, a stitch of clothing, a brick or board, that isn`t where it is and in the form it takes without oil. Oil runs the machines that plant the farmer`s seeds, runs the pumps that irrigate it, runs the reapers that harvest it. The farmer`s produce is processed and shipped via oil. We would all starve without it. This holds true for just about everything in our society, yet many want to restrict our right to oil. If government can control oil, it can control the individual. Those who behave in certain ways, ways favored by the energy masters will prosper, while those who are disobedient will wither. …

Energy usage is certainly a measure of wealth, and those who are energy poor are poor. Wealth is a measure of power, and the poor are rarely powerful. If the Democrats can restrict energy usage through an energy “crisis”, they can control the flow of wealth and the flow of power. They instinctively understand this, and labor diligently to make a reality of their plan, with what at first glance appears a very confused energy policy. It`s not; the goal is to nationalize resources, to break the power of the wealthy providers of energy and draw it into their own bosoms. Remember Maxine Waters` call to nationalize oil? Nationalizing energy is one of the first priorities of tyrants. The ultimate goal of the Democrats’ strategy is to nationalize these resources.

So, when we see Pelosi turning the lights out on the House Republicans to end debate, what we are really seeing is a lust for power, an attempt to keep freedom out of the hands of the average American. Pelosi`s “lights out” makes a chilling metaphor — a symbolic “lights out” for America. Do we want a nation where our betters guide us from their high perches, where our ability to make and use energy is circumscribed by a cadre of control freaks bent on reshaping how we live to better please themselves? Drilling for oil seems to be a straightforward proposition, but the implications for our future society are staggering. We cannot allow the collectivists to lock up our energy, lest all we hold dear should fade away in the general brownout.

Timothy is dead-on in his analysis that controlling energy is controlling people, and the Democrats stand for nothing if not controlling individual behavior. From telling us what kind of light bulbs to use, how much to drive, what temperature to set our thermostats, what to eat, etc., Democrats lust for the power to control all aspects of our lives. Democrats want to control American’s behavior in order to “save the planet,” or to appease the bruised egos of socialist countries jealous of American power and independence. Democrats don’t trust Americans to make “the right decisions” on how to spend their own money, so why would they trust citizens to utilize energy?

Democrats don’t trust freedom because people might choose to do things Democrats don’t like. Democrats want the power to decide what we are (and aren’t) allowed to do. They have never trusted free citizens: it’s in their Marxist DNA to control.

Hell, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t even think it’s necessary to trust her colleagues to vote on an energy bill. Consider the fiasco that ensued when she appeared on “This Week” last Sunday with former-Clintonite George Stephanopoulos:

On Sunday’s “This Week,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) was asked repeatedly why she refuses to allow this issue to come to a vote.

The look of disgust on Stephanopoulos’s face as Pelosi mumbled non sequitur after non sequitur was almost more telling of his sense of frustration than the number of times he asked virtually the same question: “Why won’t you permit a straight up or down vote?”

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if you feel you have the better arguments, why not give a straight up or down vote for drilling?

PELOSI: Because the misrepresentation is being made that this is going to reduce the price at the pump. This is again a decoy, it’s not a solution.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, if you’re right, why not let it be debated out and have the vote?

PELOSI: We have a debate every single day on this subject. What you saw in the Congress this week was the war dance of the hand maidens of the oil companies. That’s what you saw on the Republican side of the aisle. Democrats and Republicans are not right there on party lines on this issue. There are regional concerns, as well as some people concerned about what this means back home for them. But we have a planet to save. …

STEPHANOPOULOS: But why not allow votes on all that? When you came in as Speaker you promised in your commitment book “A New Direction for America,” let me show our viewers, you said that “Bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full, fair debate consisting of full amendment process that grants the Minority the right to offer its alternatives.” If they want to offer a drilling proposal, why can’t they have a vote?

PELOSI: They’ll have to use their imagination as to how they can get a vote and then they may get a vote.

Then Nanny Nancy has this gem (highlighting is ours):

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not going to permit a vote, you may get beat, but you’re not going to permit a vote on your own?

PELOSI: Again, we take this one step at a time. But while we’re spending all of this time on a parliamentary tactic when nothing less is at stake than the planet, the air we breathe, our children breathe.

There it is.

To fully understand this, we offer a quote from a Congressman who was discussing the Republican’s House revolt yesterday on the Sean Hannity show. Sorry we didn’t catch his name, and we paraphrase:

To Republicans, oil is a natural resource.
To Democrats, oil is an environmental hazard.

The Democrats do not care about gasoline prices.
The Democrats do not care about energy prices.
The Democrats do not care about American energy independence.
The Democrats have no plan to seriously address this energy crisis.

The Democrats hate oil — a natural resource manufactured by the planet — and want to see its use eliminated entirely regardless of whether or not an alternative exists.

The Democrats will lie, spin and deceive to hide this fact, but it is the truth.

And Nancy Pelosi, our Imperial Speaker of the House, will use her power to accomplish that goal. To hell with the rest of the Congress, and to hell with America. Nancy knows best.

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