Aquarian Weekly 5/30/01
REALITY CHECK

OILMEN TO THE RESCUE

George W. Bush is an oilman. Make no mistake about that. To write or utter anything about an energy crisis and the President of the United States and avoid that slice of information is tantamount to discussing Martin Luther King's contribution to the Civil Rights movement and fail to make the distinction about his race.

This is a prickly time for Captain Shoe-In now that his spotty environmental record is put to the dollar-sign test and his oil buddies are sending him gift baskets with tiny notes reminding him why he sits behind the big oak desk on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Thus, no sane human wanting to continue a career in public servitude need entertain fantasies of Bush or anyone on his payroll walking into a meeting with the CEO of EXXON or MOBIL and demanding to cut back on profits to save the average consumer a few cents on the gallon. Not during this economy and not with the GOP running things.

Ari Fleischer would have to call a briefing to announce the drilling of crude oil in Bush Sr.'s head before that would happen. Mining the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a literal walk in the park in the face of this kind of dedication.

Environmentalists aside, anyone calling themselves American cannot be happy about paying two dollars a gallon to fill up his/her guzzling SUV to an industry reporting a annual 53% profit margin. We don't give half a fart about any polar bears or white wolves or the serenity of virgin wilderness if it means being raped by angry Arabs wiping their collective ass with large, unmarked US bills.

Drilling on American soil is an answer. It's either that or Junior makes a call to Kennebunkport and gets daddy's war chart out of mothballs. Oilmen worth a salt will bomb Middle Eastern cities long before the three-dollar-a-gallon alarm begins to clang in the oval office. Bill Clinton ignored that one. His alarm was hooked up to Barbara Streisand's cell phone and the Hoola Hoola Tittie bar on Corcoran St.

Big Bill left the oilman to clean up the mess, like the oilman's poppa left his successor a pissed off Iraqi tyrant.

Out here on the outskirts of reality things are bogging down. I know small trucking firms that have recruited state inmates to carjack oil rigs in the middle of the night on the NY Thruway. They abscond with at least a dozen men engaged in highway detail a week by greasing the guards and grabbing them off the Garden State Parkway. My main man, G-Padre traded a pair of brand new Nikes for a return trip fill-up to Atlantic City and back. It was pitiful to see him hand those beautiful sleds over to some grease monkey for a couple of gallons of gas.

But times are hard and they call for the most desperate of measures.

I overheard one reporter friend tell me that Time magazine editors are throwing around Jimmy Carter's name for a Bush cover story in June. "The comparisons are frightening," he said. "Man barely beats sad-sack VP and is elected president under the pawl of a limping economy and a stand-off with OPEC."

This jarred my own memories of selling doughnuts and coffee at the Freehold gas lines in the late 70s'. I can vividly see that sweaty fat guy punching a pregnant woman square in the face for having an even license plate on the odd day or vice versa. I cannot recall the details. I just know it's the kind of thing you don't forget easily.

And who will forget two dollars a gallon for gasoline anytime soon? If this keeps up, Bush will have to find an animal to screw or sell old college photos of he and a hairy cross-dresser on a coke binge to the Weekly World News in order to alter the legacy of the 2001 gas crunch. Who will run things then: Some left-wing radical actor like Warren Beatty talking about shiny cities on the hill? They'll talk of the Bushs' as one-term losers and a tainted dynasty of fatback oil barons licking the boots of terrorist sympathizers.

But there is no need to worry, unless you have any plans on visiting wildlife preserves. Not likely. You'll be at the gas station long before that. Anyway, before the president allows his unceremonious ousting at the hands of liberal Hollywood freaks, he'll be using the Yale campus as a blasting area for earth-culture tests.

It was all the vice president could do to keep a straight face when Tim Russert suggested the administration turn the whole affair into the OK Corral with Chaney and Bush on one end of the dusty street and EXXON and MOBILE on the other. I was hung over and barely awake, but I could swear Chaney smiled and said, "Tim, you can put a fancy dress and deep-red lipstick on a high plains wart hog, but it sure don't make it the prom queen."

Americans pay for tons a shit they don't use, like education, health club subscriptions, deodorant; but everyone uses oil, so they will pay. But it is getting painfully obvious that the far end of the tether is within site and this always leads to political fallout or war.

But, a loss in profits?

Nope.

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