Party Like It's 2001

Where'd all this anti-China rhetoric on the far right come from all of a sudden? First a couple of GoOPers claim that their computers were hacked by the Chinese, and now Fourthbranch Cheney is working everyone up with claims that the Chinese are drilling oil off the Cuban coast - which is not true.

To gin up support for off-shore drilling, the Right has an ace up its rhetorical sleeve: the Chinese in Cuba. Here's Vice President Cheney.

"[O]il 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.''

"Even the communists" is a nice flourish. Mix the red scare with the yellow scare and get Uncle Dick's own Orange Scare. Guaranteed to freak out Americans concerned about their energy security [...]

Problem is, that's all false. Like, completely false. China is not currently drilling off the shores of Cuba; in fact, it doesn't even have a off shore drilling contract. What is does have is a permit to drill on Cuban land. "China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period,'' Jorge Piñon, an energy expert at the University of Miami's Center for Hemispheric Policy, told the Miami Herald. In fact, it is not yet drilling on Cuban land, either.

Even former RNC Chair Mel Martinez shot back against this particular rumor.

Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.

This is what's known as a "zombie lie." Now that's it's out in the ether, Republicans will assert it over and over again without proof, to both prove that more drilling and exploration is needed and to stoke xenophobic fears about the Chinese. When George Bush was coming into office the PNAC crowd began a deliberate search for a new enemy, and until 9/11 China was seen as the consensus choice.

That's what this is about. Republicans have to have a foreign enemy to channel their energies. I guess the Iranians and Al Qaeda aren't that special anymore.