About a month ago, as the debate over coastal drilling began in earnest, Dick Cheney pushed the rhetorical envelope a bit, telling the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that “oil is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida. We’re not doing it. The Chinese are in cooperation with the Cuban government…. Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply. Yet Congress has said … no to drilling off Florida.”
It’s been a common Republican talking point, but it’s patently false — the Chinese are not drilling off Cuba’s coasts. The day after Cheney made the bogus claim, the VP’s office acknowledged that he was mistaken.
And yet, for some reason, high-profile Republicans can’t stop repeating the claim that’s already been debunked. Maybe conservatives have decided that they can’t win a debate on energy policy on the merits, so lying to people about communists stealing our oil is the better strategy. Here’s failed presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani talking to CNN’s resident right-wing clown, Glenn Beck, last night:
“You look at Cuba,” Giuliani said, “Cuba is going to allow China to drill for oil within 80 miles of Florida. And Florida had a 300-mile limit. So in essence, we have China drilling for American oil…. An American company would do it much more carefully. It would be regulated better.”
Maybe it’s my imagination, but it almost seems as if high-profile Republicans have been repeating the false claim more now that it’s been debunked.
TPM has been keeping track of all the examples, and there are some real doozies in there. Some Republicans have altered the myth a little — I think Giuliani is the first to suggest that the Cubans and the Chinese are taking our oil — but they’re all repeating a charge that isn’t remotely true. Either they don’t know what they’re talking about, or they know the claim is false and repeat it anyway. At this point, it’s hard to know which is the case.
The WaPo’s Ben Pershing called it the “myth that keeps on giving,” and a “good illustration of the D.C. echo chamber.”
[T]he idea that communist China and Cuba have teamed up to drill oil just off Florida while the U.S. sits out the game has proven to be just too juicy not to repeat. The blog TPM Election Central has been gleefully tracking the number of congressional Republicans who keep making the same assertion.
Most recently, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.) repeated the charge to the Ft. Collins Coloradoan, which pointed out to her that it wasn’t true. Her office later acknowledged that she “misspoke.” Other Republicans who have made variations of the same debunked point include Reps. Mark Kirk (Ill.), Virgil Goode (Va.), Jean Schmidt (Ohio) and Sam Graves (Mo.), who was smacked for it today in a column in his hometown paper, the Kansas City Star.
The Internet is fueling this trend in both directions. On one hand, the growth of blogs and e-mail makes it easy for an untrue assertion to be repeated so many times in so many places that people will believe it (see this obvious example). On the other hand, fact-checking sites, digital cameras and the all-powerful YouTube make it more likely that people who repeat the China drilling story will get caught saying it. It will be interesting to see how much longer this particular myth will live on.
It’s been nearly a month since Cheney’s office backpedaled, and his colleagues haven’t picked up on reality yet. It’s not exactly encouraging.