Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The Gorey Details



Fat Albert’s done it again. Surprised the hell out of a hell of a lot of people, including the ones who worked for him at his television station. Some of them cried. Some of them sued.

Why? Maybe you haven’t heard. You don’t hear much. Fat Al sold his TV station to Al Jazeera.

That’s right.

For a second there, you got the horrors. Al Jazeera? Isn’t that Arab television? Aren’t they, sort of, our enemy? But no, no, then you remember. You’re multi-national. You’re global. You don’t have feelings like that.

And it’s true that Al Jazeera sometimes tells us more of the truth than our own besotted newsmen, who spend their time mooning over Obama. Never mind that. Al Jazeera is the propaganda arm of another government. 


The government Fat Al sold his station to is Qatar. Qatar used to be poor as dirt, until they discovered natural gas under their sand. They are now (per capita) the richest country in the world. Why shouldn’t they have a propaganda arm in America? A nice little TV station to unite the Arab community. Maybe because many of the Qatar royals are friends of Al Queda, and to introduce logic, which I know you don’t like, “A friend of Al Queda ain’t no friend of mine.”

The station was having troubles; principal among them was no audience. Even you didn’t watch it. But the price fetched was half a billion dollars. What did Qatar get for these big bucks? Why, they got Big Al himself. In case you don’t remember he was once the most popular man in America; he won the popular vote.

So here’s Gore and Jazeera - Al and Al – skirting the Foreign Agents Registration Act which requires that if you represent the interests of either friend or foe in a "political or quasi-political capacity" you’ve got to register and jump through all kinds of full-disclosure hoops. Do you think Big Al has done this? No, he just sold a TV station and is advising the new owners.

You know that natural gas I mentioned? All of a sudden we’re farting, er fracking, huge amounts of that mostly methane substance, out of our previously useless shale and into commercial use. The White House is considering whether or not to allow its liquefied form to be exported – slipped into the world’s energy mix.

Sounds good – money for us on top of the Holy Grail of energy independence. No more kissing OPEC ass. And a few strategic bonuses: freeing Europe from Russian gas gouging, allowing India to finally give their Iranian suppliers the finger, and other friends, like Japan, to end their energy crises.

Yes, liquefied natural gas, a new era of cheap clean energy. And right now the world's leading exporter of this product is, you guessed it, Qatar. If we enter the market they’ll still be in business, but at half the price, maybe less. Billions upon billions of lost revenue. Then Qatar won’t be rich, at least not as rich. 
 
Al Gore’s a great lobbyist. He’s got friends in high places. If it weren’t for W and the Supremes he’d have been the highest. Here is my gorey proposition. Look for Al Gore stepping up to keep the U-nited States of America from passing their gas in the world marketplace. Maybe even slow down all that fricking fracking for our own use.

One more connection: Last year’s Doha UN climate change conference. All about Al and his fraudulent polar bears. But what is Doha? Why Doha is the capital of Qatar. The plot is thicker than crude oil.