Courtesy of Talking Points Memo and with a hat-tip to the Big E for taking time out of Independence Day to post on it, here's a shot of Minnesota's Sen. Norm Coleman reciting with slight modifications a myth about the Chinese drilling for oil off our coast:
At the same time, we've got to be producing more...outer continental shelf exploration. The Chinese are able to begin operating nintey miles from our shore by working with the Cubans, American companies need to tap into those resources. I read estimates, estimates of over 80 billion barrels of fuel being available in our reserves in the outer continental shelf...
Now, granted, Sen. Coleman continues on (past the content of the video) to say "it's all hands on deck, renewables..." and that's where it ends. That's a nice, safe, sortakindamoderate position to take -- as long as he's not misleading his constituents in the process.
But mislead he does, and with a thoroughly false myth. New Hampshire's John Sununu (also currently locked in a tough reelection battle) has modified the myth for his own purposes and been caught. Rudy Giuliani repeated it last week on Glenn Beck's show. Vice President Dick Cheney was dinged for passing the myth off as factual just last month, so at least Norm Coleman isn't the highest on the totem pole to do so.
But what is it with Republican elected officials these days repeating repeatedly debunked rumors as fact?
If we were in some kind of time warp to the late 1950s, this might be considered some kind of Red Scare: The Communists are stealing our oil! Instead, it seems like a new market-based approach to political scare tactics: China has long been seen as an ascendant power in world politics and economics, and supposedly shared political ideals between two nominally Communist governments are simply a convenient detail to use when trying to scare voters into thinking that our oil is being stolen out from under the continental shelf.
There was a similar joke put forth a few years back about how the Iraqi people had been unfortunate enough to have their country's borders positioned on top of so much of America's oil supply. But it's probably out of style by now.
