Tales from the Mark Side: The Conservative Voice in Manatee County

A different kind of liberal mandate is unfolding at the gas pump

By Mark Young

The progressive push for a Green New Deal in Biden’s so-called Build Back Better legislation has rightfully received a lot of push back, but Biden has other ways to push that agenda, and at the cost to the working family.

I have no issues with green energy, but progressives continue to push an agenda that this country simply can’t flip a switch and adapt to overnight, economically speaking. And like everything in America, there should be options and choices, not one way forced down our throats by a government that is allowed to exist by and for the American people.

When Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline, environmental hypocrite John Kerry said, well those pipeline workers can just get jobs making windmills.

That’s how out of touch these people in charge are right now. Career politicians have no clue who the American worker is or what the American worker does because they have never worked for a living.

They live in the same bubble as Hollywood celebrities who live their lives literally in a world of make believe. They have no idea what living in the real world is all about and what it takes to survive.

Biden’s policies to put control of oil production back into the hands of OPEC, while destroying our first venture into energy independence in 70 years thanks to Trump, is an act of lunacy.

I’m not name calling here. I’d love to be challenged by any Democrat who thinks that it is a good policy to shut down our pipelines while allowing our adversaries to do it without throwing some environmental hazard fairy tale at me.

So sorry, I’m a creative guy, but lunacy is all I got.

I’m no conspiracy theorist either, but at the same time, I’m not blind and certainly not ignorant. It’s becoming pretty evident that Biden is intentionally making fossil fuels so painful to Americans that his goal of every American driving an electric vehicle is a mandate of another kind.

Besides shutting down the Keystone pipeline project, while simultaneously approving a Russian pipeline project that will make NATO allies dependent on Russian oil, Biden is now looking at the possibility of closing the Michigan pipeline.

And there is absolutely no reason for it. The White House said it’s studying the market impact of shutting down the pipeline. I wonder how much that study is costing the taxpayer. I can tell you the market impact: It won’t be pretty and if you think gas prices are high now, just you wait.

And we have three years of this president signing economy-killing executive orders all in support of green energy mandates, electric vehicles and keeping his beloved Amtrak alive.

Amtrak has been long subsidized by federal tax dollars for decades, because like the post office, they simply don’t know how to create a business model that makes money.

Old Joe has a long love affair with Amtrak, as has been publicly noted by him over and over again with a fake story about some Amtrak employee telling him he had traveled more than a million miles.

Except that didn’t happen either. The man Biden referenced was long retired when Biden says the conversation happened.

And even if it was true, who cares how many miles you’ve traveled on Amtrak? That’s a reason to keep giving a failing company millions of our dollars every year? What are you, the Manatee County School District?

Granted, that one is not a Hillary Clinton level lie alleging she was under sniper fire in Bosnia, which proved to be untrue, but it is another lie. Lying is something Biden has never been shy about doing if it serves his purpose of crowd manipulation.

That’s why he kept telling that lie several weeks to crowds after it was already proven to be a lie.

However, the consideration to shut down the Michigan pipeline is both manipulation and vindictive politics.

Biden hired former Michigan Gov. Granholm as Secretary of Energy and you don’t think there is some payback to Michigan residents there? Makes about as much sense as hiring former small town mayor Pete Buttigieg as Secretary of Transportation.

A small town failed mayor, I might add. He couldn’t even manage his own city’s bus system, but now he’s in charge of the entire country’s transportation system. I mean, come on, is there any wonder that very system is in chaos?

The politics of political favors run swamp-level deep in this administration. Remember when we had a president who hired people who knew what they were doing because they were qualified? Yeah, me too. Good times.

And then, of course, Granholm cackled when asked what her department could do to increase oil production.

She called it a “global commodity” and said she wished she had the magic wand to get OPEC to increase production because they are the ones in control.

What’s funny about that? Just one year ago, America didn’t need OPEC to do anything and if we did, Trump just reminded them that if they wanted continued military defense financial support from the USA, they better step up production.

And they did.

Now OPEC tells Biden no, and can you blame them? Biden’s entire political strategy is to eliminate fossil fuels so he is basically telling OPEC he wants to put them out of business, but then asks them for more business?

Good Lord, you just can’t make this nonsense up. We all remember how well the “magic wand” comment went for Obama when it came to him saying Trump could never get U.S. manufacturing companies to come home.

But he did.

And now they are leaving again because of Biden’s policies.

Biden recently insulted Americans saying we aren’t smart enough to understand how the supply chain system works. I’m pretty sure he’s not smart enough to understand because he can’t figure out how to solve it.

He certainly doesn’t understand how the energy supply system works when you give up your own independence to hand control back to a foreign entity, basically tell them you don’t like the product they produce and then expect them to help you?

If that’s not a Ron White moment of, “You can’t fix stupid,” I don’t know what is.

Biden doesn’t understand the inflation problem either, which by the way hit a 30-year high this week. He doesn’t understand that when your policies cause the price of gas to go up, everything goes up.

Petroleum goes into a lot of manufactured goods. If the price of that petroleum goes up, so does the price of those goods.

Fuel is needed to deliver and distribute goods. If the price of fuel goes up, so does the price of those goods.

There might be a lot of cogs that make the supply chain go round and round, but that’s the very first cog that is easily repaired with Trump’s common sense policies.

If you break that first cog, everything breaks behind it.

No Joe, it’s really not that hard to understand. What’s easy to understand is that you are just a really, really bad policy maker. Biden always has been and always will be a bad policy maker. Unfortunately for us, he now gets to do it at the highest executive level.

It’s going to be a long three years of this nonsense but there is hope to make a statement in one year by making him a lame duck president by taking the House and Senate in one giant red wave, locally, statewide and nationally.

Want to save America? Vote Republican and for God’s sake, vote policy over personality.