The low-key greeting
President Joe Biden bumped fists with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman when the two men met for the first time in Jeddah on Friday, effectively putting an end to his efforts to shun the Saudi leader.
“Yo, buddy. That whole cutting up Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw thing is water under the bridge.”
The low-key greeting underscored the tense circumstances of the trip, with Biden seeking Saudi promises to help lower oil prices, but wanting to avoid any appearance of being too friendly with Prince Mohammed, 36, whom he’d vowed to ostracize for the 2018 killing of columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Look, we need the oil, ok? What are we supposed to do, figure out how to manage without it? Be realistic!
The chairman of the US House intelligence committee, a Democrat, wasn’t buying it.
“If we ever needed a visual reminder of the continuing grip oil-rich autocrats have on US foreign policy in the Middle East, we got it today,” Representative Adam Schiff tweeted. “One fist bump is worth a thousand words.”
Torturers on the one hand, climate change on the other – our hands are tied. Tied, I tells ya.
We have had since the 1970’s oil crisis to figure this out, since we were outraged at prices rising to $.549 gallon, and people waited in gas lines on odd-even days to fill our land yachts.Even if you thnk that global warming is a liberal scheme and hoax, trucks and pickups that get 10 miles per gallon (but sit on lifters and sound loud) are expenisve as daily drivers. Instead of getting into hybrids, it’s fun to pay extra and go coal-rolling to pwn the libs.
The sweet part of all this for the Saudis is that with their close ties to US through Aramco and their large stake of ownership in Fox News, is that as oppressive as their regime is, they never have to pay social consequences. Even the UN includes them on the Council of Women’s Status.
And they get away with torture and murder of an American journalist.
Of course, what a lot of people don’t realize is that gas prices were nearly as high in the 1930s and in the late 1970s to early 1980s, times when salaries were substantially lower. It seems likely that high gas prices contributed in a huge way to Jimmy Carter’s failure at getting reelected, though the economy as a whole was also in a period of inflation.
I remember in the late 1970s, when I was still a young driver and working for minimum wage, the fear that went through all of us about the rapidly rising gas prices. In the early 1980s, when I was a young married woman with a child, it was still frightening. There were a lot of jokes about mortgaging your house to buy a tank of gas. And then…gas prices went down. Now they are high again, but as a percentage of income, $5 today is a lot less than $5 was forty years ago. We’ve gotten used to cheap gas, and damn us, we want to keep it.