TURNING ON THE CHARM….George Bush met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah today. I love this paragraph from AP’s account:
Traditionally Bush holds news conferences with visiting foreign leaders, but there will be none during this visit because Abdullah rarely talks with the media. The president got around that by emerging from the building well before Abdullah’s arrival and engaging in what was made to appear to be an impromptu exchange with the reporters gathered there.
Italics mine. Sounds like AP’s Jennifer Loven is getting annoyed.
Elsewhere in the story there is much gnashing and moaning about increasing Saudi Arabia’s production of oil. The Saudis’ carefully worded reply was that they were “producing all the oil that our customers are requesting” and that they would increase their capacity by 1.5 million barrels per day by 2009 ? without mentioning that by that time world demand will have increased by about 8 million barrels per day. They also claimed to have 1.5 million barrels per day of spare pumping capacity right now, an assertion I’d take with a shaker of salt.
In other words: nice talking with you, but there’s no more oil to be had. Now please excuse me, I have a flight to Beijing to catch.
