By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
I wish Vladimir Putin could have seen the video and heard the heartbreaking cries of anguish from the mother in Ukraine as she followed her six-year-old daughter into the emergency room where she died, killed by Putin’s war.
Apparently, Putin is such an evil man that it doesn’t matter to him that he’s now responsible for the deaths of countless numbers of small children.
Not only is the blood on Putin’s hands, but it is also on the hands of radical environmentalists in our country.
As many have already pointed out, Putin could not have financed this war if oil prices had stayed down around $30 a barrel as they were under President Trump.
I know that millions of people in this country had an obsessive, irrational hatred for President Trump.
But he had led this nation into energy independence to the dismay of U.S. environmentalists, and they control President Biden and the Democratic Party today.
I have known for years that almost all our environmental radicals have come from wealthy or at least very upper-income families.
For years, one of their main goals has been to get people to drive less. They are people who can afford gas at five or six dollars a gallon.
Their policies really hurt not only all who drive but also the millions who heat their homes with oil.
Higher oil prices have driven up the cost of everything, and environmental rules and regulations have caused the loss of millions of jobs to other countries.
When people urge more exploration and drilling for oil, those on the left would always say that it would not help today.
But when we started doing more drilling and production under President Trump, it brought oil prices down very quickly, and when he left office, gas was around $1.80 a gallon.
All the excessive, drunken sailor spending Congress has done over the last couple of years has required the printing of about three times more money than is usually done.
This has led to inflation on everything, now the highest in 47 years and possibly heading even higher.
When President Biden says as he did again in his State of the Union speech that anyone making under $400,000 is not going to pay more in taxes, he is ignoring what they are already paying and the fact that inflation has for years been called the cruelest tax of all.
And when you add in the big jump in gas prices, it means that lower and middle-income people are being hit hardest of all.
It is one thing when wealthy environmentalists are forcing everyone to pay higher gas prices that only upper-income people can afford.
But it becomes much worse when it helps an evil man like Putin become much richer and enables him to finance a war where many thousands are being killed.
Some Democrats who possibly feel a little guilty about this have been loudly demanding that we immediately stop buying oil from Russia.
But this would drive our gas prices even higher unless we also reopen the Keystone XL Pipeline Biden closed and stop over-regulating gas and oil production.
The environmental lobby and the Democrats they control in Congress simply will not allow these steps to be taken.
One other group that helped cause this war has been the Neo-Cons who have demanded the expansion of NATO to very near Russian borders.
Many of our leading foreign policy experts have warned for years that all this NATO expansion could lead to a war with Russia.
You can see on YouTube Professor Stephen Cohen speaking about this in 2010 and Professor John Mearsheimer in 2015, and many others since then.
The first President Bush promised many years ago that we would not do this, and some believe even the present war could have been stopped if we had once again promised Putin, we would not add Ukraine and any other countries to NATO.
As power-mad and evil as Putin is, the world will be very lucky if this war does not lead to even more death and destruction than it already has.
