Obama's oil production protest fails fact-checking test

Hugh Hewitt: Obama's oil production protest fails fact-checking test Hugh Hewitt Columnists Washington Examiner

By: Hugh Hewitt

"So any notion that my administration has shut down oil production might make for a good political sound bite, but it doesn't match up with reality." So declared President Obama Friday with the practiced firmness of voice and direct look into the teleprompter that signals to veterans of the Obama watch that the chief executive has strayed far from the truth.

In May of 2010, Obama's secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, issued a six-month moratorium order for drilling on the outer continental shelf. When the courts struck down that illegal order, Team Obama switched to a slow-roll strategy, demanding new permits for exploration, and accomplished the same thing as a moratorium.

Jonathan Tilove, the New Orleans' Times-Picayune's Washington correspondent, set a standard that few met national reporters met when he collected the statements of Louisiana legislators in response to the president's whopper:

"The gap continues to widen between what President Obama claims to be true about domestic energy production and what Louisianans know is true," said Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

"With prices at the pump climbing toward $4 per gallon, the president is asking us to believe that his administration supports expanded drilling off the Gulf Coast," Vitter continued. "I guess that's true only if you don't actually need a permit."

"Someone should tell the president that April Fool's Day is still weeks away," said Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La., told Tilove. "Today's news conference is another example of the president misleading the American people regarding his energy policy.

Tilove got similar quotes from Louisiana Republican Reps. Charles Boustany (the "president's remarks ... are wholly untrue"), Rodney Alexander, Bill Cassidy and Steve Scalise. They all provide variations on the same theme: The president isn't telling the truth about oil production and his administration's war on new supplies.

Of course, we don't have new wells off East or West Coast, and, of course, the president hasn't done anything to expand production in Alaska either. It is absurd for the president to claim anything other than that for which he deserves complete credit: Bringing new exploration to a halt in a vain and destructive attempt to force America to stop consuming the oil that in his mind and the mind of his political allies is imperiling the planet.

Far more remarkable than the president's brazenness with the truth, which has become a routine feature of Obama's "preside-but-don't-lead" tenure in the Oval Office, is the liberal mainstream media's willingness to indulge it.

The president preaches fiscal restraint but advanced a reckless budget and refuses to suggest any entitlement reform. The MSM is silent.

The president imposed Obamacare on an unwilling country and then issues more than a thousand waivers to the friends of Obama and the politically connected. The MSM is silent.

And now with gas prices soaring and an angry population turning their political fury on the president, he runs from the responsibility which is surely his and claims childlike wonder at the idea that his no-growth/no-oil policies are to blame. And the MSM is silent.

A craven MSM continues to abet the president's enormous incompetence in all aspects of his job. The credibility gap that has grown and grown around the president since January 2009 has now reached the point where Obama no longer cares to pretend to the truth and the press no longer cares to report that fact.

The price at the pumps doesn't lie, however, and that is Obama's price, a price that flows from his policies, and which defines his politics. That price will also define his presidency from now until November 2012.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/03/hugh-hewitt-obamas-oil-production-protest-fails-fact-checking#ixzz1GcMG7bBf