DESANTIS: How come it’s wrong to produce our own oil and gas here but you can go to Saudi Arabia and fist bump to try to get it from Saudi? I mean, it makes no sense that we wouldn’t do it. We have opportunities here to be inter-energy independent and not have to worry about any of these other countries; and yet they’re intentionally not doing it. And you can’t run a modern economy on windmills. You just can’t do it.
So we do a lot of solar in Florida. It is a complement. It isn’t displace the traditional forms of energy. And so now we’re in a situation they’re bragging that gas has gone down over the last however many weeks, it’s still over four bucks. Like, I had never seen it over four bucks my whole life living here. That is the problem. It’s just when you’re cranking the printing presses, you’re making energy more expensive, you know, that creates an upward pressure on all of this stuff.
BUCK: Everything the governor of Florida Ron DeSantis said there is correct, and on top of that, what is the Democrat response? It’s remarkable.
We’ve seen the fist bump in Saudi Arabia and they can say, oh, that’s just about optics, at least it wasn’t a high five. But going to the Saudis to ask them to produce more oil when the Biden White House has said they’re gonna use the Defense Production Act for solar panels but still don’t want to — you will never hear them say, “Drill, baby, drill.”
You will never hear Democrats in office now say, “You know what? Maybe in 10 years we’ll have a different situation, but for right now, what’s best for us, for our economy and, yes, for national security, for geopolitics globally, would be to produce as much domestic energy, oil and gas, as we possibly can.” They will not say this. They think it’s icky. They think it’s a moral question, not an energy question.
They believe this hysteria about the world is gonna end if we don’t — you know, go back and watch. I invite anybody although I don’t want you to give any more money to my ever to him because he’s such a fraud and an imbecile. But you go back and watch the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, the most successfully financially documentary — it’s an editorial, but documentary of all time. And Florida’s underwater in like 1930, the whole state.
These people are out of their minds. This is back 15 years ago now. But everything they say doesn’t happen. They want you to forget all about it.
BERNSTEIN: The president will aggressively fight to attack climate change because he knows it’s one of the reasons he’s here, and it is absolutely core to transitioning from where we are to where we need to be.
BUCK: Clay, they’re out of their minds.
CLAY: If we had an honest media — and we all know we don’t. I don’t know if you saw the Pew Research data reflecting how little trust there is in the media in general, television and newspapers in particular, if we had an honest media, when Joe Biden walked out and fist bumped MBS and went in for that meeting in Saudi Arabia, everyone would have stood up and said to Joe Biden, “Wait a minute, sir. Why did you get on Air Force One, fly all the way across the country, all the way across the world, spend God knows how much on greenhouse gas emissions to get here, and then beg basically on bended knee for Saudi Arabia to produce more oil and gas?”
Instead of us being energy independent — Sarah Palin was a hundred percent right when she said, “Drill, baby, drill” — instead of us being energy independent and keeps the tens of billions, the hundreds of billions of dollars that you could make off of oil and gas, we’re giving all that money to Saudi Arabia or Iran by default or Venezuela and eventually when Russia ends the war in Ukraine, back to Russia, all of these places are getting our money.
And if you’re truly concerned about the climate, the oil and gas produced in Saudi Arabia is actually dirtier than the oil and gas that is produced in the United States; so we’re pending with the same amount of demand for oil and gas but you’re somehow arguing that the United States is not complicit because we’re bringing it from somewhere else? Somebody would just ask about that hypocrisy. Almost no one does.
BUCK: And Saudi is still a totalitarian fundamentalist theocracy, everybody. That hasn’t actually changed. So, you know, we don’t focus on it as much because we’re not at war in the Middle East the way we had been for a couple of decades. But this is not a country we really want to make richer. It’s actually not in the interests of the world to have Saudi have more flu in geopolitics.
There have been some moderating influences in recent years in Saudi. The move toward Israel has been a good thing. There are some things that are moving in the right direction, but, you know, we still don’t really want to be making the Saudis as rich as possible. And not just the Saudis. The Russians.
But, Clay, we have to remember that for climate change catastrophists, I mean, for the true believers here, they’ll believe anything. Nothing is too stupid and in fact no person is too stupid for them to take advice from.
Here is, with a few million viewers a day, The View, Joy Behar explaining to the viewers of that monumentally stupid show — I mean, the show should come with a bargain. “By the end of this program, your IQ will have dropped 10 to 15 points.” Here she is saying, if only we could get less gas and less gas and oil production used in America, then we wouldn’t have to ask the Saudis for it.
BEHAR: And let’s not forget that Trump was pals with Putin and Kim Jong-un, practically had them in the Lincoln Bedroom. I mean, he was really interested in being with those guys. So this is just somebody I think — I mean, I do defend Biden quite a bit, I know, but it’s like, you know, if Manchin and some of these Republicans would allow the industries to just cut back on fossil fuels and get alternative fuels going, he wouldn’t have to, you know, fist bump this guy, who, by the way, he did say to him I think that you are responsible foreign policy Khashoggi’s death. And the guy goes, no.
BUCK: Pathetic and — but if Republicans would let him cut back on fossil fuels, they’re desperate for cheaper fossil fuels, you monumental moron. It’s unbelievable that this stuff is said on television.
CLAY: She is the dumbest person on television. I will say one positive thing about Joy Behar. I didn’t realize she’s 79 years old. I thought she was maybe, you know, 70.
BUCK: She looks good for 79. I’ll be honest. She looks good for 79.
CLAY: I’m gonna kind to Joy Behar. I didn’t know she was almost 80 years old. She’s Joe Biden’s age. And as little sense as she makes on television, she made more sense on television than Joe Biden does. And unlike Joe Biden, she’s just sitting on the dumbest show on television, as opposed to trying to lead the free world. And so all of this is embarrassingly dumb on behalf of Biden.
But the fact that the media doesn’t call him on it, Buck, is what infuriates me far more. Because the fact that he gets the Air Force One, flies over to Saudi Arabia, begs for more oil, they are the best of the bad options. Venezuela is an awful option. Certainly Iran is an awful option. And we can’t even get Russian oil right now. The problem with the petrodictator states is none of them are particularly embracing human rights.
MBS has done a better job, women can drive cars now in Saudi Arabia, they have movie theaters that people can go watch movies in. To your point on the theocratic state, there is big difference oftentimes between the rights that exist even in Saudi Arabia which is considered to be an enlightened Middle Eastern country and many others out there.
CLAY: Enlightened Middle Eastern country? I mean, they’re not —
BUCK: I wouldn’t go that far. A conversation for another time.
CLAY: The standard is low. But when, you know, for a long time. they wouldn’t even let women in Iran go watch soccer matches, right? I mean the standard is so low that it’s like, hey, you let women drive cars and go to —
BUCK: Morocco, Jordan, these are more enlightened.
CLAY: More enlightened.
BUCK: Yeah.
CLAY: Yes. Well, you’re the expert on the Middle East. My point is they’re better than they used to be, and for the countries that have massive deposits of oil, I think they’re the best of the bad option. Venezuela’s got basically communist dictatorship, they’ve lost their minds, they have no idea what’s going on there. Iran is about to have nuclear weapons and maybe who knows what’s gonna — they got Putin visiting right now.-
BUCK: We deal with Saudi because we have to deal with Saudi on oil and also on geopolitics in the Middle East. There’s no going around Saudi because of oil and also because it is the site of Mecca, and so the importance of Saudi Arabia to the region politically and to the world in an oil sense means we want to have as productive a relationship with them as we can. We’re just not gonna get, you know, Jeffersonian democracy breaking out tomorrow.
CLAY: The better option here would be if Biden from the get-go had not tried to turn them into a pariah state and had acknowledged, look. There are lots of things that are going on in Saudi Arabia we disagree with. We don’t need to try to isolate them forever.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: That was just, “Oh, I got a moment where I’m gonna get all the blue check libs to say I’m smart,” and then he’s like, oh, wait, I’m not smart.
CLAY: Well, and he also didn’t anticipate that we would end up with the highest gas prices of all time and that because of his choices that he had made in the United States, we wouldn’t be able to produce enough oil and gas. And again, the best of the bad options has been in Saudi Arabia, just not a good one.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: We talked before about this looming showdown between DeSantis and Newsom. Even if it’s not a presidential showdown, the state that is the most sort of anti-lockdown, conservative, pro-freedom state during covid, Florida, and the most insane lockdown, no eating or drinking outside allowed at restaurants, no paddleboarding on the ocean, California.
We actually have DeSantis taking a swing at — you better watch out, man. Heavy D knows how to throw a punch. Here’s DeSantis talking about Newsom.
DESANTIS: This is the guy that locked people down, that kept kids out of school, denied people the right to earn a living, wanted to force covid vaxes on people. What did I do? I stood in the way of all that. I lifted people up, we stood with students against the teachers union, we stood with individuals against Big Government, and we make sure that people had the choice about whether they wanted to take this vax or not. They should not have ever been in a position to lose their job.
He also attacked me for helping these special Olympic athletes. These athletes were — they have Down syndrome, disabilities, and they wanted to compete in the Special Olympics in Orlando. Well, there’s an international bureaucracy affiliated with the group that imposed vax discrimination on these athletes. The athletes I met, their doctors told them not to do it based on their condition. So what did we do? We fought the bureaucracy.
BUCK: It’s gonna be great, Clay, to watch this play out.
CLAY: If you missed where this all started, Newsom said the reason he bought the ads in the state of Florida was because Ron DeSantis fought against a covid shot requirement for Special Olympics athletes.
Of all the reasons that he could have chosen to come after DeSantis, letting parents of kids of special needs make choices that are rational for them for the Special Olympics so that as many of them can compete as possible, that’s the battleground that Ron DeSantis was attacked by for Newsom?
He lives in the upside down, to use a Stranger Things reference, he thinks that his state is the free one. And I don’t think the vast majority of the American public believes that at all. And so this, to me, is a recipe for a disaster, but it might also be an early preview of what 2024 might look like.
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