And Now Hillary Clinton Wants To Sue OPEC

As the race for the Democratic presidential nomination goes on longer and longer, Hillary Clinton's candidacy becomes an insult to the intelligence of people further and further down the IQ scale. Earlier this week, the beer-swillin'est gun-shootin'est valedictorian of Wellesley ever! decided to base her Indiana primary campaign on a gas tax holiday proposal so imbecilic even Paul Krugman, who's been running agitprops for her ever since John Edwards dropped out of the race, had to concede the point. Last night, HRC appeared on the O'Reilly Factor, presumably to commiserate over the plight of what O'Reilly calls "the folks" with an even phonier populist than she is.

Naturally, when O'Reilly claimed that "both parties, both parties have sold the folks out on energy, and now the folks are gettin' hammered, and they should be angry at both parties," Clinton couldn't resist upping the ante for extra-chromosomal energy policy. She intends to pay for her gas tax holiday with a tax on "windfall profits" to the oil industry, which, as Krugman points out, simply means taking back the windfall profits that a gas tax holiday would giftwrap to the oil industry, and justified said tax on oil companies by claiming that there "is no basis for them to have these huge profits." No basis, that is, except for the oil companies selling a product and consumers buying — you know, the legal transactions loophole.

But the stupid burns the worst when Clinton draws the proverbial line in the sand and announces her intention to "take on OPEC…I would file complaints [in the WTO] and change the law so citizens and businesses could file anti-trust actions. We're going to begin to hold them accountable." It goes on like that.

Megan McArdle links to trade law expert Marc Benitah's list of reasons the scheme couldn't possibly work — but fuck that asshole, what does he know, he probably eats arugula from Whole Foods, am I right? — and she adds:

OPEC isn't restricting production right now; pretty much everyone is working their capacity flat out. Hillary Clinton wants to sue OPEC for not producing oil from wells they haven't drilled yet. Next: a lawsuit against Ford for not building us the cool flying cars we were promised in The Jetsons. I WANT MY FLYING CAR!!!!

Yes, and I'd like to sue the human genome project for not making me super-fast, super-strong, and immortal, but let's not get carried away.

So Hillary Clinton is betting that people gullible enough to believe her candidacy is still relevant are also gullible enough to buy into an economic platform that appears to have been co-drafted by Huey Long and Rube Goldberg. At some point though, reality will intercede, and Clinton's supporters probably ought to be closely monitored to avoid some kind of Jonestown scene.