A useful news story would have included Alan Greenspan acknowledging "what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." A helpful account would have cited Gen. John Abizaid, the former CENTCOM Commander, explaining that "of course" the Iraq war is "about oil." Journalism that cares as much about sobering context as it does about B-roll bs would have reminded us that Halliburton's Dick "Secret Energy Task Force" Cheney dissed conservation as a panty-waist "personal virtue" a few months after he was sworn in as Regent. Instead of exhuming archival footage of gas station lines from the '70s, producers might have re-aired the more recent tape of former Harken Energy director George W. Bush strolling hand-in-hand through the Crawford bluebonnets with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, just in case anyone was wondering about the durability of the generations-long House of Bush-House of Saud alliance. And speaking of His Highness, perhaps it also would have been useful to see the There He Goes! Here
He Comes! Andrews Air Force Base shots of Cheney's 14-hours-each-way flight to see King Abdullah for eight hours in Riyadh, a no-press-corps/no-press-conference trip just after Thanksgiving last year which surely had nothing to do with oil, ya think? And as long as we're connecting the dots, it wouldn'thave hurt if some reporter with a decent megaphone had reviewed the number of times that Republicans in Congress and the White House have fought against windfall profits taxes and for juicy new tax breaks for ExxonMobil.
But I still don't get why the press hasn't been all over this whole oil-soaked scene or why more Americans aren't up in arms over it.
If you have any ideas, please leave a comment.
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