I've said before that one of the reasons for the jump in oil prices that no one is talking about is the way Bush insisted on continuing to buy oil for the Strategic Reserves even after he had surpassed previous levels and even though he was buying it at the highest price in our history. I argued that if he didn't want to release some of the Reserve the least he could do was quit buying for it. Sometime after that, asked by a reporter if he would consider releasing oil he said No. Asked if he would suspend buying oil for the Reserve until the price came down, again he said No, arguing that - here we go again - our "national security" was at stake.

Bull puckey. He was - and as far as I know still is - propping up the price for his buddies in the "ahl bidness" by continuing to spend our money buying massive amounts for the Reserve at stratospheric prices. I would have been a lot happier if Obama had made that point rather than his suggestion yesterday that Bush should finally release some of the Reserve a la Clinton, but it's a start.

Barack Obama put forward a broad energy plan Monday designed to end U.S. reliance on imported oil within 10 years and shore up his standing amid a tightening White House race and high-anxiety over gas prices.

Obama's new proposal, though, includes two significant reversals of positions he has taken in the past: He had steadfastly fought the idea of limited new offshore drilling and was against tapping the nation's emergency oil stockpile to relieve pump prices that have stubbornly hovered around $4 a gallon.

"Stubborn" is the right word, though it ought to be applied to suppliers not to the inanimate gas which has nothing whatever to say about what price it gets sold at. It's interesting that when the price of a barrel of oil goes up you'll see pump prices follow in less than a week but when it comes down it seems to take forever for the drop to be reflected at your local station.

It needs to be noted by either BO or his campaign media staff that Bush has been piling up the Reserve at record prices, probably as a way of keeping them high, and while they're at it they might try focusing the "inflated tires" message to sharpen the point that Obama wasn't making an serious suggestion of how to solve the gas crisis, he was making a comparison to what a tiny difference extra offshore drilling was going to make to the price of gas.

But of course if he did that, he'd have a little trouble explaining why it's suddenly OK with him if the oil companies fill the Gulf of Mexico and the California coastline with drilling rigs. If it isn't going to maske that much difference in the price, why is he agreeing to risk environment to do it?

Oh, right - he's a politician trying to get elected. And as Al Giordano has explained magnificently, we shouldn't believe a thing Obama says during the campaign because it will have nothing to do with how he governs.

Still, though Obama's energy plan as a whole is a masterpiece of evasion and pretty if meaningless sentiment, the very least Bush could do is stop buying and, even if BO is simply saying it for political points, the Reserve should be released because it does bring the price down very quickly. See, when the president releases the Reserve, as Clinton did, he's signaling the oil speculators that the govt isn't going to prop up their profits any longer - which is why Bush hasn't done it. They normally respond to a dose of cold financial news by pulling back so if W had done it several weeks ago - before the speculators got scared because everybody had stopped buying and the price started to drop anyway - a lot of people would have been spared a lot of financial pain. Given that the price on the oil markets has already started dropping, I'm not sure what releasing the Reserve would accomplish at this point but it certainly couldn't do any harm.

Oil profits are what his presidency has always been about.