Count On Barack Obama To Upset Our Closest Ally

Count On Barack Obama To Upset Our Closest Ally

From the June 25, 2008 Canadian Financial Post:

Big-city U. S. mayors and presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who joined the parade this week of ill-informed, U. S. anti-oil sands policies, should be careful what they wish for.

While the aim is undoubtedly to pander to the electorate in an election year charged with oil and climate-change debate, what they are stoking is an increasingly angry Canadian energy industry that is seriously looking at non-U. S. markets for its oil.

Here's what Rick George, chief executive of Suncor Energy Inc., Canada's largest single oil sands producer, said this week, reflecting rising frustration with the wave of American anti-oil sands policies:

"We are down to very limited amounts of spare capacity," he said. "Mexico is in very steep decline. The North Sea is in decline. Venezuela is likely to slip from here. There are problems in Nigeria, Russia. The world will absorb this oil one way or the other. If the U. S. doesn't take it, then we will develop other markets."

Borrowing heavily from the rhetoric of the environmental movement, right down to using the pejorative "tar sands" to describe Canada's reserves, mayors from the United States' largest cities adopted a resolution at a meeting in Miami on Monday singling out Western Canada's oil-sands sector as part of a crackdown on fuels that cause global warming.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama vowed to break America's addiction to "dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive" oil if elected U. S. president -- and he said one of his first targets may well be imports from Canada's oil sands. A senior advisor to Obama's campaign said it's an "open question" whether Alberta's oil sands fit with Obama's vision for shifting the U. S. dramatically away from carbon-intensive fuels.

Hmmm. Here's a source of oil right next door, where the money won't be funding dictators, religious fanatics, or people that like to blow themselves up--and Obama wants to shut it off. And you were saying that the nasty rumors about Obama being a closet Muslim are just vicious lies? What, exactly, would you expect a closet Muslim to do, if not for this guarantee that we will be even more dependent on oil from places where they have their turbans wound too tight?

Let's try this, Barack Hussein Obama: Pakistan is an ally (not a very strong one, I admit). We don't invade allies. Iran is our enemy--and has been in a state of undeclared war with us since 1979. We don't roll over and engage in submissive urination for an enemy. Canada is our ally--the closest ally that we have. We don't go out of way to insult an ally.

Foreign policy is complex--but Obama seems to be failing even the kindergarten level of it.