Actually, according to retired Gen. Tommy Franks, that spot is already taken by Doug Feith, one of the miserable architects of a war strategy that beats the hell out of the stupidity of any war policies our government has ever undertaken.Feith has a book coming out this Tuesday, April 8, in which he will be blaming the Bush administration's foreign policy and Middle East failures on everyone but those responsible for the war's massive screwups. Ironically, at least to me, exactly four years before his book's release date, I castigated Feith's handling of the Pentagon's so-called Office of Special Plans, in part of a speech I made at UAA. At the time, I quoted the most important article written up to that time on Feith, by former USAF LTC Karen Kwiatkowsk, PhD, in The American Conservative magazine. The speech ended in a near-riot of uncivil discourse.
Feith's book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, has already been soundly derided by people like Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post, and Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC's Countdown:
So, if Doug Feith is the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth, where does that put Dan Fagan? Retired UAA Prof, Steve Aufrecht, PhD, has been the most thorough and accurate chronicler of Fagan's pollution of the public discourse. Aufrecht wrote his first column on Fagan at What Do I Know? on the day Fagan's first Anchorage Daily News column was printed, June 10, 2007. Since then, Steve has directly covered Fagan seven other times.
I've written about Fagan's racism and hatred toward Muslims. And, like Steve, I've written about Fagan's obvious sexual insecurity, and his dim understandings of women and femininity. And about how discouraging it is to see him enabled by a fine newspaper like the Anchorage Daily News. Were Fagan spewing his vile bile about any groups other than Arabs or Muslims, he'd be out of a job or two by now.
Today's Fagan column in the ADN, titled Oil Firms Are the Only Innocents Here, though it steers away from the worst meanness Fagan has exhibited, creates one of the longest lists of falsehoods this hack has yet penned. I'm going to attempt to take it apart, lazy paragraph after pathetic sentence, as Steve did in one of his Fagan essays:
Did you see the headline in the New York Times? "Big Oil Executives Defend Profits." Congress made it clear last week we've reached a new milestone in our slow creep toward socialism. Profits are bad. The word profit no longer travels alone in newspapers. It now follows the word obscene.
One of Fagan's themes is that we're slowly creeping toward socialism. We're not. The highest personal and corporate income tax rates in the USA were during Dwight Eisenhower's administration. Since then, the trend has been relentlessly downward for these tax rates. The gap between America's richest and our country's strength - a strong middle class - grows every hour.
Class envy is an old game in politics and politicians play it well. Especially when it involves an easy target like oil company executives. Politicians forget less than a decade ago the price of oil hovered around $8 a barrel.
That's right. Under Bill Clinton, the economy was chugging along, oil was cheap, and people could afford to live in the Alaska Bush. But your cronies have screwed that up. The dollar was worth 30% more than the Euro then. Now it's worth 30% less.But this is 2008 and high prices at the pump and budget-busting home heating bills provide the perfect opportunity for vote-seeking politicians to demonize the industry.
Dan would rather we do what? Or that politicians avoid looking at this, or merely seek advice from the energy monopolies?
But is the industry really to blame for rising energy costs?
In part, yes, but there are a host of problems that have led to this, the most basic being increasing worldwide demand for a finite, non-renewable resource. The Chinese are at the point of overtaking the US global lead as importer of oil.
Environmentalists, not oil companies prevent drilling in ANWR, fight drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Sea, and block drilling off Florida's coast. These policies limit U.S. supply and force us to import more than 12 million barrels of oil a day.
Environmentalists, and many other groups are concerned about existing examples of oil company negligence, and mistrust guarantees given by companies like BP, for instance, whose recent negligence on our North Slope was so obvious.
Environmentalists, not oil companies, fight to block the building of U.S. refineries.
Though no new refineries have been built in the US in the past 20 years, saying that environmentalists are responsible for this is like saying environmentalists are responsible for Levi Strauss deciding to make pants in Mexico or Indonesia, or Microsoft out-sourcing to Bangalore. Oil companies build refineries overseas, primarily to cut labor costs and so they can build them in ways we wouldn't allow them to - shoddily. To ignore this is highly meretricious. Oil companies have expanded U.S. refinery capacity considerably over the past 30 years:
"The industry has found it costs less money and takes less time to expand existing facilities. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. refining industry has added the equivalent of one new, state-of-the-art refinery a year, each with a capacity to refine 150,000 to 300,000 barrels per day."
Environmentalists also lead the charge against the most efficient and cheap energy available: nuclear power.
So, go get a job at the Chernobyl radio station, Dan. The basic problem with expanding nuclear power plant numbers in the U.S. is that the only "safe" designs are far, far more expensive to build and maintain than any electrical utility could afford to build. Mini plants, like the one built by Toshiba and proposed for Galena, can only be built with a huge grant of Federal or state funds. I'm sure Dan would approve of that. I think it is called "socialism."
And then there are dictators like Hugo Chavez, not the oil industry, that tie the hands of the producers. That lowers supply, increases demand and drives up prices.
Hugo Chavez, though authoritarian, is not a dictator. The elections in which he was put into the Venezuelan presidency were among the fairest in that country's shady electoral past.
The Venezuelan government is investing millions of dollars per month in dealing with the pollution and environmental legacies of the days of rampant oil company manipulation of the country's ecosystem in their oil fields. In Lake Maracaibo, the government is spending over $2,000,000 per month dealing with pollution legacies. The energy companies who created the disasters there, are creating new ones in Equador, Nigeria and elsewhere, try to get off scott free every chance they get. Sort of like Exxon and the Exxon Valdez, Dan.
Adding to the supply crunch are greedy, corrupt leaders like those in Russia, not oil executives.
As opposed to our leaders like Dick Cheney, who moved many Halliburton operations offshore, so that they 1) wouldn't have to pay U.S. taxes, and 2) could do hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with Iraq under Saddam, and Iran, in violation of U.S. law?
And then there are socialists like our own governor, who raised production taxes on the industry 400 per cent. Our governor also passes legislation that helps keep producers from building a gas pipeline.
Sexually insecure Dan Fagan can never let Sarah Palin alone. I think there may be more here than meets the casual observer's eye. Besides that, he's wrong. Palin isn't a socialist under any sane definition of the term. And in the 41 years that a gas pipeline hasn't been built since the opening of Prudhoe Bay, Palin has been governor for just over two of them, and is trying harder than all previous governors put together to get a deal through.
More supply is the key to lower prices and when it comes to supply oil companies want to drill, drill, drill. But environmentalists and politicians like our governor get in their way.
I'd let that one pass without comment, it is so simplistic, except for one thing: I've noticed on the radio, and sometimes in print, that in the next sentence, after mentioning a woman he's fixated upon, Dan starts sharing his fantasies. Drill, drill, drill, Dan? heh...
We never hear those on the left mention any of this when talking about high energy costs. But blaming the oil industry is typical with the left. The left loathes the industry. They blame it for global warming. Liberals believe oil producers present a clear and present danger to their god, Mother Earth.
Another simplistic argument. Most knowledgeable people on the left, where most scientists reside, know that the earth is in a long warming trend. They also believe the mounting evidence that CO2 emissions are exacerbating that, and that oil consumption represents part of the emission addition. As far as Gaia or other earth mother faiths, 90% of the liberals I know are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics or atheists - not Gaians of any sort. I'm a Unitarian.
Those in the media have clearly joined in on the side of environmentalists in the war against the oil industry. You can tell by the way the media refer to both sides. Environmentalists are now conservationists. The oil industry is now big oil. Big bad oil!
Yeah, right. That's why we have Conoco-Phillips ads blasted all over the ADN, APRN, KTUU, and so on, ad infinitum. That's why, in spite of Fagan's writing deficiencies and hatred, he's allowed to cross-platform his ignorant rants.
The media should support science when it is sound, not when it is funded by energy companies determined to falsify the record. But, Dan's premise of the media only crafting language to suit a liberal agenda is totally false. They pick up terminology like "no child left behind" and "clear skies" as adeptly as they switch "environment" to "conservation."
Liberals in the media are also quick to jump to cover the mistakes of the industry. If a producer drips an ounce of oil on a blade of grass the media swoop in with live trucks, helicopters and a regiment of reporters. It's a circus.
I know, he's exaggerating... The other side of this coin, though, is - at what point should pollution stories be ignored? As usual, Dan is no help.
The danger of all this anti-oil populism is it leads to a shift of power from the private sector to government. Government-owned oil agencies now control about 90 per cent of the world's petroleum reserves. Fourteen of the top 20 upstream oil and gas companies in the world are now government controlled.
The first part of what Dan is saying here is one of his mantras. He doesn't think countries or states should be able to own the oil under their soil. He's accurate on the second point, for what it's worth.
Everyone likes to blame big bad Exxon for high prices as though Exxon can control prices. There are 14 oil companies, most of them government-controlled, with more oil reserves than Exxon.
I've haven't heard Exxon blamed for high prices in years. They were blamed for the high prices in the summer of 1989.
And it is only going to get worse. Investor owned oil firms like Exxon, Chevron and Shell are buying back their stock instead of increasing their reserves. Governments and politicians make it more difficult for investor-owned companies to drill with higher taxes and the threat of unstable regimes.
Dan's getting a bit incoherent here. He's been confusing apples (control of proven reserves) and oranges (control of production/distribution) all along. For these companies to increase their reserves, they can't just leave the earth. The barriers Fagan describes are only increasing pretty closely to the increasing importance of what remains of this non-renewable treasure to the country's that own them. How are companies going to stabilize such an investment climate, worldwide, or in North America?
What politicians like Palin and others don't understand is the more difficult they make it for private-sector oil companies to meet U.S energy needs, the more power they transfer to government-owned oil producers in other countries.
Note how Dan brings Sarah back in. He's again accusing her of taking something away from him.
Many of these governments are led by dictators who would love nothing more than seeing the United States come begging for energy.
Dan's fixation in the next sentence after talking about a woman he's depicting - S&M visions this time around - come out again. The problem Dan's sense of history has with this, is that what he's actually complaining about is that in too many cases "our" dictators - the Shah of Iran was one of many - are being replaced by others.
Every time a U.S. politician raises taxes on the industry, passes an anti-drilling law or caves to an environmentalist, the cost of heating your home and filling up your tank goes up.
Dan offers no solutions. Unless we do what? Go back to letting oil companies write our state statutes, like they did for 20 years?
It also weakens us as a nation.
This feature in Fagan's narrative bothers me more than the sexism and narcissism, less than the racism and denigrations of minorities, and of others' faiths. He stands with so many of the other yellow chicken hawks in our community, in our so-called liberal media, on our pulpits, in the marketplace - especially the corporate marketplace, totally misplacing the blame for the recent disgrace of our country in the eyes of the world.He misses a lot of points, some from his rigid beliefs, others from his obtuse lack of curiosity. He's not the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth. Another sock puppet has that distinction. No, Dan Fagan is merely one of the biggest laughingstocks in Alaska.
