Somewhere deep in our breasts lay the faint hope that anybody'd be better than President Bush in the struggle to enact sane environmental and energy policy. Barack Obama has been making some hearteningly reality-based comments about offshore drilling and energy policy lately, and the formerly "maverick" John McCain cultivated the image that he was an environmental standout in his party. We've had some reason to hope that, even if McCain does become the next president, sanity in some measure might return.

Nope.

Turns out McCain trusts oil industry executives more than the Energy Information Agency, completely blowing off the recent EIA report that indicates that the soonest offshore drilling could come online is 2017, and would make no impact whatsoever on whatever oil prices are in nine years. Instead, he embraced the assurances of unspecified oil executives that drilling could begin within months.

"In fact I met with oil executives just a few days ago in California ... and the fact is that we can, using existing facilities, expand our oil production within months, according to these executives," he said Friday. "In my view and that of oil company executives that I've talked to -- the people that actually do it, not those that comment on television, but those that actually do it -- we could, in a very short time, have a beneficial effect."

It's even a question whether those "oil executives" said any such thing, or even if he actually met with any; the American Petroleum Institute, that bunch of treehuggers, says that "before a lease sale could even occur, a complete environmental study would have to be conducted by the government. Once leased, it could take anywhere from five to ten years for production to begin, depending on the amount of oil and gas discovered, availability of infrastructure and the geological complexity of the region."

Which begs the question, who on earth is McCain talking to?

One wonders if McCain is really prepared to effectively lead a government whose specialists he doesn't trust, on the strength of uncited information from one side of the oil industry's mouth. Sounds like a prescription for more Bush-style manipulation of regulation and regulatory agencies in the service of industry priorities to us.

"Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?" - Hunter S. Thompson