John McCain's California Adventure

Well, John W. McCain had a great couple of days in the Golden State. First he went to Santa Barbara, site of a huge 1969 oil spill, to promote his plan to cancel the moratorium on offshore drilling, and he ran into an expert who rebutted his entire premise.

Feeney also took issue with McCain's controversial proposal to lift the moratorium on offshore oil exploration: "It makes me nervous to think about those who are proposing to drain America's offshore oil and gas reserves as quickly as possible in the hopes of driving down the price of gasoline, because I think when you look at the good sources of information, were we to open up the California coast or the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, it would be 12, 15, maybe 20 years before those resources came online and got to full productions."

Adding that some research shows that drilling in ANWR would only "reduce our dependence on foreign oil from 70% to 67%," Feeney added, "I'm not sure most Americans would think that's really worth the price of admission."

Then, in Fresno, he admitted that there would be no material benefit to offshore exploration:

That Charlie Black comment wasn’t McCain’s only off-message moment yesterday. At a town hall in Fresno, CA, McCain admitted that the offshore drilling proposal he unveiled last week would probably have mostly “psychological” benefits, NBC/NJ’s Adam Aigner-Treworgy notes. “Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial." Uh oh.

Later, at a fundraiser, an attendee very nicely called him an idiot:

"We're really kind of goosey here about oil spills, and we're goosey here about federal drilling and oil lands, which are abundant offshore,” the attendee said. “So we ask you to look out there to the south and the southeast and remember the greatest environmental catastrophe that's hit this state and then balance that with the notion of winning California."

And McCain topped it off by telling Fresno that we went to war for oil.

I also want to make sure that we will take concrete steps towards eliminating our dependence on foreign oil.

And I am confident that uh, the, the conflicts that we are in in both Iraq and Afghanistan have also a bearing on that.

(Incidentally, is there anyone in America who doesn't know this? We've been going to war for oil since oil started powering cars. Before that the world used a lot of whale oil, and if we still did America would be at war with Sea World.)

Thanks for coming, Big John! Please stop by again sometime and further ruin your candidacy!