I would like to add something quick to Kevin’s post. (I’m too nervous to watch every pitch of the Tigers versus the Royals.) I spent some time near the crowd today — and that crowd was more like a mob, in my view. Swarms of zealots, screaming — literally screaming — against a devil they call “fossil fuels.” These people did not seem to me democrats assembling in support of a cause (however misguided). They struck me as ideologues, people in the grip of a negative passion, the kind of mob that would be wowed by Hugo Chávez.
I hope I do them an injustice. (But I doubt it.)
P.S. I have never much liked the recent expression “on steroids” — that got old within a year of its regular use, to me. But Manhattan today has been Ann Arbor on steroids. (Some readers know that Ann Arbor is my hometown and a frequent punching bag of mine.)
P.P.S. If only people felt as passionately against dictatorship and human-rights abuses — in China, Cuba, the Arab world, and elsewhere — as they do against fossil fuels. There are real enemies in the world, but oil and natural gas aren’t one of them (or two of them). And against what is the people’s fury directed? Against what do the schoolteachers preach? Of course.
P.P.P.S. A preview of my column tomorrow (you can tell that I don’t want to watch the ballgame, can’t you?):
Toward the end of his [September 10 speech, which was mainly about ISIS], Obama turned to domestic affairs. And he said — get this — “Energy independence is closer than it’s been in decades.”
The audacity the man has (and not the audacity of hope)! Yes, his sentence about energy is true. But it’s true despite the fact that he and his party have worked night and day to prevent the energy independence that we’re nearing. They are a sworn enemy of oil and natural gas, a sector in which America has experienced a “renaissance,” as Harold Hamm says.
(He is the leading oilman in the country, or one of them. He is the thirteenth and last child of cotton sharecroppers in Oklahoma.)
Okay, I’ll have to face the music — the game in Kansas City. And that was a good post, Kevin.