In a speech on Thursday in Maryland, President Barack Obama claimed former President Rutherford B. Hayes wasn’t particularly good at his job because he was supposedly dismissive of the telephone and its technological potential.
Obama was making a case for his administration’s push for renewable energy investments. But his jab at Hayes was historically unfounded.
On Friday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized Obama for that “whopper.” But other aspects of the president’s speech struck Krauthammer as even more problematic.
“You know, in basketball this would be a double technical,” Krauthammer said. “Obama will stomp on anybody, living or dead, if he’ll get a laugh out of it, and you know eight people who will end up on his side on Nov. 6. But I think the whopper in his speech was where he said, at one point, he said, ‘The real way to reduce prices on gas in America is to decrease demand.’ Then, within three minutes of the same speech, he said we can increase production offshore all we want. It will have no effect on the world price.”
Krauthammer explained that Obama’s speech contradicted itself regarding how administration policies can affect supply and demand.
“Well, either demand increasing supply and decrease in demand are going to affect the world price, or neither will,” he continued. “But, the idea that demand — lowering demand will decrease the price, [leading to] increasing production will not is simply a whopper. I can’t believe he said that in the same speech. You wonder if he ever reads his speeches in advance.”
Krauthammer told “Hannity” fill-in host Rich Lowry that the Obama administration had its sights on raising energy prices to force the development of “algae” to save the environment.
“His EPA, I can assure you — if he is reelected — is going to do everything it can to shut down, restrict and constrain these new technological wonders, which will start producing gas at such an incredible rate,” Krauthammer said. “I mean, his administration is intent, as his own Secretary of Energy had said in 2008 — of course he recanted just two days ago in Congress, Galileo-style, but he said it, and he obviously believes in it —- that we need to raise the price of gasoline to European levels: about $8-a-gallon. And he believes it. Obama also does. They want to see the stuff we use every day hiked in price so that we will abandon it, so that we will adopt algae, or whatever else he invents tomorrow, and so that we will save the global environment. It’s a theology on their part, and that’s what they believe in.”