A Threat To Security

Investor's Business Daily ^ | 31 Jan 06 | Editorial staff

[Kitten Festival]

Energy: Sens. John Sununu and John McCain are right to question America's reliance on foreign fuel. If barriers to U.S. drilling and nuclear power weren't so bad, we wouldn't see such oil-fueled menaces. This must change.

Right now, it's easier for big oil companies to drill in faraway places such as Nigeria, Russia and Iran than get a permit to drill in the U.S.

That's why we don't have many options when an unbalanced dictator such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez taunts his No. 1 customer as a "perverse, murderous, genocidal, immoral empire" and calls on the world's leftists to "bring it down" — as Chavez did last weekend.

He knows he has us over a barrel because our country is virtually off-limits to new drilling.

... plenty of legislators are to blame.

McCain called it right when he told Fox News last week: "We better understand the vulnerabilities that our economy, and our very lives have when we're dependent on Iranian mullahs and wackos in Venezuela." In response, Venezuela's vice president, a radical leftist and friend of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, told McCain to "go to hell."

Sununu put his finger on the flip side of the problem when he criticized New Hampshire's rush to get cut-rate fuel in the absence of adequate supply.

"Hugo Chavez ... is selling Venezuela's assets at cut-rate prices while his country languishes in poverty ... and New Hampshire should take no part in such a tragic and misguided charade."

Is it a coincidence that high oil prices have created more than a few "wackos" out there?

...

As the U.S. expends blood and treasure to spread democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, it makes little sense to see our imported-oil habit undercutting the effort.

[Kitten Festival]

Delahunt and Kennedy are the prime enablers of high energy prices and the rise of Hugo Chavez.