ABC’s Paula Faris on a recent edition of Good Morning America: “The best news, it (the gas price) might drop another 50 cents by Halloween, just before the election.”
ABC in 2008: “Cutting the gas tax actually goes against the long-term energy goals all three candidates have embraced, cutting pollution and reducing our dependence on foreign oil,” ABC correspondent David Wright told viewers during Charles Gibson’s nightly news program. “If more people are out on the roads, those problems will only get worse.”
Later that year after gas prices temporarily fell due to a combination of the global economic crisis and then-President Bush calling for offshore drilling (which the incoming Obama administration would of course quickly renege on), Tom Brokaw of NBC, plus editorial writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post all called for even higher gasoline taxes to punish motorists.
But then, the old media’s energy price schizophrenia merely reflects the ideology of the man they boosted into office in 2008 and are propping up today. In 2008, Mr. Obama called for bankrupting energy companies and higher gas prices, as long as their cost increase was a “gradual adjustment” — to the European nosebleed level prices supported by his energy secretary, Steven Chu.
Earlier this year, during one of his rare press conferences, Obama told a reporter, “Just from a political perspective, do you think a president of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher? Is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense?”
Yes, almost everyone in the room — including Mr. Obama — three years ago.
And to borrow from his remark to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility” — which presumably includes a return to his 2008 promises to cripple the nation’s energy supply and raise gas prices even further, as old media collectively implored him at the height of their “We Are All Socialists Now” hopenchange euphoria of late 2008 and early 2009.
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