September 8, 2008 8:45 PM

Cuba and China Working to Drill In Gulf, Say Those Who Insisted Saddam Was About to Nuke America

Everywhere you look - from Republican congressional press conferences, to newspaper op-ed pages - the political world is abuzz with the news that China is drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to cooperation with Cuba. How, ask these outraged conservatives, could Democrats oppose offshore drilling knowing about this incredible news?

Because this incredible news is, in fact, a fabricated lie. Here's McClatchy:

"Why, ask some Republicans, should the United States be thwarted from drilling in its own territory when just 50 miles off the Florida coastline the Chinese government is drilling for oil under Cuban leases? Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR. 'China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period,' said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico."

McClatchy then walks through how the conservative machine fabricates such lies and turns them into assumed "truth" - and wouldn't ya know it, Dick "Iraq has WMD" Cheney is a big cog in that machine:

"Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech Wednesday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, picked up the refrain. Cheney quoted a column by George Will, who wrote last week that 'drilling is under way 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are.' In his speech, Cheney described the Chinese as being 'in cooperation with the Cuban government. Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to higher prices means more supply...But Congress says no to drilling in ANWR, no to drilling on the East Coast, no to drilling on the West Coast.'"

I guess the next thing Cheney will tell us is that Saddam Hussein, though dead, still supposedly has nuclear weapons that still supposedly threaten the United States with imminent disaster.