CBS Gets Results!

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

After spending much of the spring and summer hyping the dire consequences of rising gas prices, CBS on Thursday night decided the plummeting cost of gas at the pump is really bad news. Noting that “crude settled at about $58 a barrel today, that’s about $90 less than it was in July,” fill-in CBS Evening News anchor Harry Smith warned “that comes as a mixed blessing.”

Reporter Mark Strassmann found an ecstatic man paying less than $2.00 a gallon, but Strassmann spoiled the mood: “Low gas prices are also bad news and the lower prices go, the worse the news gets.” An “oil analyst” explained: “This is just a reflection of the poor state of the economy and the oil market is reflecting this global slow down.” Strassmann soon fretted over how “it’s also a grim time for alternative energy champions” and “sinking oil prices could” hurt “plans to develop alternative sources of energy or fund green developments.”

— “Now CBS Frets Gas Prices Are Too Low,” Newsbusters, November 14th 2008.

It’s a new year, and a new battle with rising gas prices. Jan. 1 set a record for the highest price ever.

Monique Griego breaks down the surprising numbers overall.

For the fifth straight year, New Year’s Day brought higher gas prices than the year before–and 2014 actually set a record for the highest price for a gallon of gas ever on Jan. 1.

— Report at CBS-Baltimore, yesterday.

As Victor Davis Hanson noted in February of 2012, “The Obama administration’s real problem is existential: What if it gets what it wants, but then finds that either it or the country really is uncomfortable with what it got?” That also sums up the river the administration is currently exploring with a paddle called Obamacare, but VDH was specifically referring to the regime’s energy policy:

We were long ago lectured by hot-house administration plants, including the president himself, about the desirability of high-cost energy in curbing fossil-fuel use and making subsidized wind and solar power and electric transportation competitive. By midsummer, the technocrats may get their wish with $5 or even $6-a-gallon gas (not quite as high as Secretary Chu may once have wanted). Will they say, “But $7 or $8 would have been more truly European”?

Bringing new meaning to the phrase “in the tank,” just as a reminder, in November and December of 2008, every old media outlet was calling for higher gas prices, including the aforementioned CBS, NBC (in the form of Tom Brokaw), the New York Times, and the Washington Post, or as I dubbed it back then, “Big Journalism’s Bronx Cheer For The Common Man.”

Maryland voters in both 2008 and 2012 chose to elect Mr. Obama, so I’m sure they don’t mind paying extra at the pump…and at tax time…and at the doctor’s office and at…