My regular readers might have noticed that stupidity usually amuses me. Encountering the ignorant almost always stimulates my intellectual curiosity. The average idiot makes me wonder if they were born with an extra chromosome or if they actually worked at understanding so little about the world around them.Sean Hannity isn't your average idiot. The man is stunningly stupid. He's one of those guys that actually looks stupid. Whenever I see him, I automatically see Jay Leno after severe head trauma. Though, to be fair to Hannity, he's actually funny, albeit unintentionally.
Look, I get that everybody on TV reads a TelePrompTer. But in most circumstances the people doing the reading are merely reciting previously held beliefs in a concise way that's easily understandable on television. That doesn't seem to be true of Hannity, who doesn't know what he believes, so he just spouts off whatever the Republican National Committee tells him on a given morning.
However, what the dumb prick said earlier this week is truly awesome, even for him.
Sean Hannity is really not having any of this price increase in crude oil coming from the powers-that-be at OPEC. Particularly incensed at Kuwait, the Fox News host criticized that nation’s oil minister Friday night for “lecturing us” and suggested that the United States “has every right to go in there and, frankly, take all their oil.”Ye fucking gods, it's been a long time since I've seen four people get together and decide to be so extraordinarily wrong about something so basic. Watching that not only made me giddy, it got me almost sexually aroused.
Hannity, who was discussing the crude oil situation with his “Great American Panel,” expressed outrage at the proposed price increases in oil, especially those coming from Kuwait. “This country would not exist for us, and the oil minister is out there lecturing us,” he criticized. Then he turned to Iraq, wondering why they aren’t “paying us back with oil” for the American military’s toppling of Saddam Hussein. “Why didn’t they pay for their own liberation?”
As neither country, to Hannity, had paid their dues, he felt that “we have every right to go in there and, frankly, take all their oil and make them pay for their liberation,” especially when “they’re gouging us” despite being nations of abundant wealth. The panel seemed to agree with Hannity on the egregious pricing of crude oil and the way it hurts America, but did not express the same approval of importing Iraqi or Kuwaiti oil without asking for permission, on the moral premise that the U.S. military liberated both nations.
Hannity fancies himself a capitalist and a lover of the free market. However, like most Republicans and an increasing number of Americans, he doesn't appear to understand it very well. Few people get as balls out angry as Republicans when capitalism doesn't work out they way they want it to.
Here's all you need to know about capitalism. Consider it the shortest economics class you'll ever take. Something is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. If demand for a good or service increases without a concurrent increase in supply, the price goes up. That's how the market works. If you're a Republican reading this, you're welcome.
Oil is a commodity that is in high demand, since it is almost impossible to maintain a modern society without it. The price has gone up dramatically in recent years because there are more modern societies than there used to be. China and India come to mind. Oil is finite and the number of people who want to be soccer moms is not.
America's gleeful fiscal self-destruction over the last decade also has a great deal to do with the price of oil. Because the U.S dollar is the world's reserve currency, oil is bought and sold with dollars. The only problem is that the value of the Yankee greenback dropped by over a third during the Bush Administration, and there's no evidence that it is going anywhere but down. Another tenant of the market is that a currency that is worth less is never going to buy more. I hate that I have to explain this to readers as bright as mine, but I recognize that Republicans might be reading, too.
Let's review, shall we? International demand for oil has gone up dramatically in the last decade. Production has not kept up with that demand. The currency with which oil is traded is worth a great deal less than it used to be. What in the fuck do you expect is going to happen to the price of oil? Mr. Hannity's ridiculous jibber-jabber aside, that is not "another tax on the American people", that's capitalism.
What's Hannity's solution? The military, which might be the craziest thing I've ever heard. The American military has been overstretched to the point that it was giving waivers to high school drop-outs, convicted felons and retards because it had to a fight a war against a tactic. What do you suppose is going to happen when it's used to maintain brisk business at gas stations in fucking Boise?
Then there are the foreign policy ramifications of Sean's fuckheaded musings. The United States has been respected and admired precisely because it doesn't have a history of fighting aggressive wars of conquest over natural resources. That will no longer be true if the kids at Fox News get their way. And if the mightiest military in human history is unequal to the task of putting down superstitious retards from the seventh century in the suburbs of Kabul, how do you think it'll do against the countries of OPEC?
The idea that the United States needs to paid in oil for liberating people is less than silly. It's actually mercenary. But since Hannity brought it up, let's look at the facts in Iraq.
Iraq is an unnatural country created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and it consists of people who very much enjoy killing one another. It has always been held together and kept away from total anarchy by tyrants who repressed the natural instincts of the populace. When the United States "liberated" Iraq from that tyranny, it also liberated it from the things that kept it who and somewhat orderly.
If you want to the recent history and future of Iraq, look at Yugoslavia. Democracy rendered the country and created the conditions for a genocide. Because of the perceived humiliation of the Sunnis and the rampant nationalism of the Kurds, there is no reason to believe that democracy is going to do anything other than accelerate the disintegration of Iraq. Within the next ten years, you're likely to see something a lot like Joe Biden's and Les Gelb's 2007 partition proposal or total anarchy.
But what were the more immediate consequences of Iraq's "liberation"? About 100,000 dead and four million refugees. The country's Christian population has been, for all intents and purposes, liquidated. Eight years later, Iraq still doesn't have an infrastructure worthy of the name. And Sean Hannity wants the Iraqi people to pay him for that? Shit, if that's an argument for anything, it's Baghdad resuming its WMD program as quickly as it possibly can!
It's also important to remember that Iraqis tend to have much longer memories than Americans do. Your average Iraqi probably remembers that the United States was quite pleased with Saddam Hussein until he got to be a nuisance. When Saddam attacked the town of Halabja with mustard gas and nerve agent, the United States issued the weakest protest imaginable. When he used chemical weapons against Iran, the Americans didn't protest at all.
Moreover, the "liberation" of Iraq wasn't achieved for its own sake. It was a product of an ultimately silly foreign policy aim, preventing Iraq from giving WMD to terrorists. It was hardly the selfless act that Hannity now pretends that it was. And it certainly isn't something that he should expect a fucking tip for.
Look, I really don't give a shit what Sean Hannity thinks. I believe that television would be better off if he was locked in a Vietnamese tiger cage and starved to death. But this isn't the first time that I've felt compelled to have this debate. That was about three years ago, when Democratic liberal Carl Levin suggested doing exactly the same thing. It was stupid then and it's stupid now.
The scary thing is that more Americans might start thinking that there's something to this horseshit. And that's not going to end well.
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