Republicans think you're dumb; George W. Bush thinks you're dumber

If you've been following the political news scene, you may have noticed a recent chorus of Republicans (and Republican candidates) who urge lifting existing bans on offshore oil and gas drilling.

As a card-carrying Republicans (despite the Republicans wishing he wasn't), George W. Bush predictably tossed in his two bits the other day -- and revealed that he thinks Americans are too dumb to tell time:

Soooooooooooooooooooo... American families are being pinched by high oil prices now, so allowing more offshore billing is the answer -- except we won't actually get any of that oil until several years later.

Americans, this is how dumb George W. Bush thinks you are.

Also predictably, the right-wing noise machine is already ratcheting up its "grassroots" support for this latest scheme. Don't be fooled, though -- this is just an election-year scam from Newt Gingrich with two goals in mind:

1. To shift the blame for high oil prices away from the Bush Administration (and the 2000-2006 Republican majority in Congress) and onto the Democrats, Barack Obama, environmentalists, and all their political opponents.

   And

2. To make more oil-drilling leases available to the petroleum companies, so they can snap up property for pennies, then sit on them and save for a rainy day the future oil crunch. As JReid points out, the U.S. government is already leasing over 200 million acres of land to the energy companies -- who have already drilled the wells and capped them, then produced nothing.

If the Bush Administration and/or the Republicans in Congress really want to give comfort to average Americans hit by high oil prices, they could pressure those selfsame energy companies into actually pumping oil from the lands they have now -- a process that would take a lot less than the years needed for new offshore drilling.

But they won't, because this isn't really about energy independence. It's just another Republi-Con-Job...