Daily Archives: 15 June 2017

Rhetoric

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There has been on Wednesday a deliberate, carefully targeted attack against a collection of Republican Congressmen practicing for a Congressional baseball game that was intended to be a bipartisan fund-raiser (the Progressive-Democrats were practicing their own team at another venue) that injured five, including the Republican House Whip who is the third most powerful House Republican, who was seriously injured.

In the aftermath we got Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) making a tendentious speech on the Senate floor proclaiming his regret over this shooting, and we got the House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) making a similarly overwrought speech on the House floor.  Both called for bipartisanship and expressed their sympathy for the shooting victims.

Other current Progressive-Democrats also say they decry this violence.

These people are at the pinnacle of their careers; they’ve reached the top echelons of the political life and career: they’re enormously intelligent.  As politicians, too, words are their stock in trade: they choose the words and phrases they use to make their points extremely carefully.

These people also have routinely held themselves and their party out as knowing better than the rest of us—that’s what underlies their position that Government will solve our problems and must do so because we cannot handle our own lives and situations.

Now: Progressive-Democrats in Congress past and present have for years openly called Republicans unpatriotic, hostage-takers, terrorists.  They say Republicans are racist, xenophobic, homophobic, irredeemably deplorable.

The physical impact of their rhetoric has become clear over the last couple of years: their followers have physically assaulted Republicans at their political campaign rallies, including one charging onto the stage to attack then-candidate Donald Trump.  Their student followers routinely attack speakers—even fellow students and professors—who disagree with them.

Now this deliberate, carefully targeted shooting attack against a large gathering of Republican Congressmen.

Can anyone really believe these politicians didn’t—and don’t—know what they were and are saying?  Can anyone truly think that these politicians didn’t and don’t know beforehand that their carefully incendiary rhetoric would lead to violence of the murderous type that occurred Wednesday?

It’s certainly true that incitement to riot or murder is no excuse for the riot or the murder (thankfully only attempted, Wednesday).

But it’s also true that there’s no excuse for the incitement to the riot or the murder.  And the Progressive-Democrats have been doing exactly that.

Saudi Oil Embargo Against the US?

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Saudi Arabia is cutting its oil exports to the US for the express purpose of directing our use of our own oil to Saudi purposes—to make us use up our existing “excess” supplies.

Saudi Arabia is slashing its US oil exports to a near three-decade low for this time of the year, intensifying its efforts to reduce a global supply glut that has been pummeling crude prices.

Not just the global gut—our supply in particular.  Saudi Arabian Oil Co is cutting its exports to the US to the lowest level since the late ’80s.  Saudi Aramco is cutting its exports to us to the lowest level since 2009, the end-game of the Panic of 2008.

[S]ome analysts say these reductions in Saudi exports to the US could be a step toward ensuring that OPEC’s cuts have the intended effect of reducing bloated inventories of oil around the world, and particularly in the US.

[Emphasis added.]

This is a prickly ally; however, the embargo (which is what this amounts to, even if not intended and even if not complete) will have little deleterious effect on us, and it’s likely to backfire on the Saudis and their OPEC compatriots.  The reduced sales, whether to us or to the world generally, only opens the world market to us: we’ll increase our market share, to the benefit of our economy.  Furthermore, we can handle lower prices than can the OPEC members and their oil allies (vis., Russia and Iran), producing profitably at those lower prices; that encourages our continued production even as the Saudis and OPEC try to manipulate price with their doomed-to-fail attempt to manipulate supply.

And the American consumer, far from the more serious embargoes of the last century, will benefit from the largely unaffected supply and the lower prices of oil (and of natural gas, which aside from being inherently cheaper also is under price pressure to the extent that oil and gas are substitutes for each other), both directly and through the ripple of those lower prices throughout our economy.