Good Questions Over beers, Web Guy sticks me with a good question. He knows I'm not exactly a registered Republican, so he asks, "Which news story pisses you off more: The House ratifying CAFTA, or the passage of the Energy Bill?" He's not exactly a registered Republican either, so I can tell that both of those burrs of legislation had gotten under his saddle. It was a good question, though, and he does a lot of IT stuff for me at no charge, so I owed him an answer as much as I owed him the beer. I kept my dissertation to a brief minimum, but there's plenty of room for a better explanation. Or at least there's room to try. (ahem.) CAFTA? Energy bill? That's what I should be paying attention to, the pulp of incredibly boring columns written by incredibly boring people, like Robert Robb of the Arizona Republic? I didn't realize these were such worthy events. It's not like they were never on the radar. President Bush has been pimping the Energy Bill since his first halcyon days in office, and CAFTA just seems like another extension of NAFTA and GATT and whatever other trade deals we have going on. As with NAFTA, the naysayers paint this agreement as pretty much the end of the world. It is the evil of globalization, they say... Well, yeah, but we're pretty far down that path already. It doesn't appear to be a reversible condition. If anything, this deal will help offset the impact that China's new "unpegged" currency will have on cheap goods that most Americans (challenged as they are by the Bush economy) can find at Wal Mart or the local dollar store. It is not an unsound idea. Unless George Orwell slipped in a few lines of dialogue while Congress was in the back room grinding the sausage, all CAFTA can do is drop the trade barriers that exist between the United States and Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. It meant so much to Bush that he actually went down to the Dome and pressed some Elephant flesh. Only 15 House Democrats (out of 206) broke ranks to support the White House agenda, to the howling horror of their peers. Don't we kind of owe those countries some goodwill - read: cash - after interfering in their civil wars and training their paramilitary death squads? The funny thing is that one of the stripes in the conservative rainbow is highly upset by the passage of CAFTA. The same folks in Arizona who are so freaked out about the Mexican border are going nuts over the fact that our Republican delegation (including Jeff Flake, who would have included Cuba if he'd had his druthers) is responsible for delivering CAFTA whole. So those 15 Democrats may not have been defectors, or anything other such nefarious thing. They just may have been laying an excellent political trap in some very staunch Republican stomping grounds; expect a few surprises in next year's GOP primaries. Just as Dubya was intent on getting his way with free trade, Vice President Dick Cheney has his greasy palm-prints all over this porker of an energy bill. While the Democrats did a yeoman's job of whittling, it is still pretty much what the Bush administration has always wanted. There are taxpayer subsidies to the gas and oil industry, which is ludicrous since they've been banking record profits just lately. There are tax incentives for power producers who burn so-called clean coal in their generators. There is a tax credit for Americans who purchase "hybrid" cars, which is quickly becoming a moot point, as the new trend is leaning toward more powerful hybrids that use essentially the same amount of fuel as their combustion-engine alternatives. Oh, and they're bumping Daylight Savings back another month, to November. Being in Arizona, that has no effect on me at all, so I've been misrepresented on this particular point (we don't do that here). But hey, does this new policy do anything to reduce dependence on foreign oil? Let's ask the president's official Spinner of Tall Tales, Scott McClellan, about this brave new law. "This legislation helps address the root causes of high energy prices." Daylight Savings? Uh, okay. So, what about the price of gasoline, Scott? "We didn't get into this overnight, and we're not going to get out of it overnight." Ah, like so many other things... Conspicuously absent from this bill is a provision to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How long ANWR will exist as a legacy to principled liberal stubbornness remains to be seen. In any event, as with CAFTA, the Energy Bill is your basic Republican legislative strategy, intended only to increase the wealth of those who need it the least. That's not news. After Web Guy had voiced these concerns to me, I quietly decided not to ask him the question I had brought to the drinking table, one that is actually best suited for conservatives. Which news story pisses you off more: The Iraqi government calling for a quick exodus of U.S. forces, or the Iraqi government drafting an Islamic constitution - one that reflects the theocratic predilections of Iran more than anything else? Good question, eh? Paul Heller 7/29/05 << back to the archives
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