Wall of Paul

Looks like it’s finally time to raise that “Mission Accomplished” banner, kids.

“The New York Times” reported on Thursday that four major oil companies - Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP - are finalizing negotiations that will once again enable them to drill for fun and profit deep beneath the golden dunes of Iraq. This Christmas morning-type news comes 36 years after Saddam Hussein launched his now-kaput dictatorship, and forced those very same companies to pack up their gigantic wrenches and get the hell out of there. Now they’re coming back, and will be greeted as liberators!

This is being advertised as a temporary solution until Iraq can get its oil-production act together. But getting its act together isn’t something Iraq does particularly well, and, at the very least, those Western oil companies will now be able to establish their presence in another place that’s oozing black gold.

What a remarkable stroke of war! I mean, “luck.”

The new deal (if you’ll pardon the phrase) will likely be announced at the end of the month. The drilling, by the way, will be the first work done by any major U.S. companies in Iraq since we began our Great and Glorious Battle To Save a Randomly Selected Country From The Clutches of Tyranny back in 2003.

The “Times” article also notes that these are no-bid contracts that won out over actual bids made by 40 other companies. So you get 4 guesses who our idiot man-child President will be playing golf with once our electoral process mercifully, and at long last, Heimlichs him like an inhaled hot dog chunk from America’s collective trachea.

That was close. For a while there, I thought Exxon Mobil might go broke. You have to ship the stuff once you get it out of the ground, you know. And gas costs five bucks a gallon now!

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Since we’re on the topic…

He’s already started, but get ready for John McCain to repeatedly insist that our oil woes would be over in a jiffy lube, if only that darn Congress would quit worrying about a bunch of fish and nix the 26-year ban on off-shore drilling in the U.S. So far, he's against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

But in recent days, none other than George W. Bush has been beating the drum for both those things to happen, and it should be obvious by now that when Bush beats a drum, McCain eventually steadies his martini and does the Watusi. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he suddenly decided, "Hey, who cares about a bunch of polar bears anyway?" If the past 7 1/2 years prove anything, it's that people just love easy answers, and the right just loves to pretend they have them right there in a briefcase.

But an article in the current issue of “Time” magazine points out that a 2004 study by the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration determined that drilling in ANWR would make gasoline a grand total of 3.5 cents cheaper per-gallon by the year 2027. Opening up all the forbidden off-shore drilling areas, on the other hand, would also lower the cost by about 3 or 4 cents, and it would only take “several years” for that remarkable plunge to occur.

McCain’s not worried about that, though. Given his current age, he’ll either be dead or generating substantial methane of his own just a few years from now.

Paul Tatara