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May 29, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - May 29

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: We can't just point fingers and sort of place blame on anyone else, foreigners over there, oil companies over here. The ball is in our court. It is up to us to act and to act soon. It is going to require a virtual revolution in our thinking about energy and in the actions that must follow.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANGLE: There is Senator Hillary Clinton recently talking about her plans for energy and reducing dependence on foreign oil. President Bush, as you heard earlier, also has his own plan.

Now some analytical observations from Mort Kondracke, executive editor of "Roll Call," Nina Easton, Washington bureau chief for "Fortune" magazine and the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fox News contributors all.

So Charles, here we are at the beginning of the driving season as gas prices have gone up over the last few months. Everybody is now concerned about energy, even though most of the plans for reducing our dependence take 10, 15, 20 years. Still, everyone is focused on this and as Senator Clinton was suggesting, this is something we need to focus on now in a major way. What do you make of her comments and where do you think we stand on this issue?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: She talked about a revolution in our thinking. Her plan is lot like the revolution in our thinking on health care that she authored about a decade and a half ago. The sheer amount of fussiness, the meddling, the nannystatism in her plan is mind boggling.

Tax cuts, incentives, regulations on everybody, on oil companies, consumers, gas station owners, every kind of meddle that you can imagine.

And this is Hillarycare on wheels. And the obvious stuff. We have a shortage essentially of oil. We have oil that is sitting in places that are in United States. Arctic wildlife, of course, off shore, she won't touch it. Source of energy, nuclear, we know it's a way to produce energy without carbon and without big pollution. She brushed it off, essentially.

What she has is a plan of unbelievable complexity that tinkers in the market and that in the end will go no where. Thirty years ago people started talking about wind and solar as the sources of the future. Well, they always will be. I have heard about it for 30 years and my children and grandchildren will be hearing about it.

So I don't hold any hope here. If there's any hope, it's in drilling, in nuclear and adjusting the price structure of oil, so that as she said, when the price declines, it's artificially kept up so entrepreneurs will look for new sources on their own without the government intervention.

ANGLE: Nina, what do you make of this whole .

NINA EASTON, "FORTUNE": I have to say this whole kind of idea that Hillary Clinton is kind of a Johnny come lately to this issue. I covered a speech of hers where she talked about energy last fall. John Kerry made it a piece of his campaign in 2004. You may think it's the nanny state but they were addressing this issue well before the Bush administration, which, by the way, put together this energy bill that was very much focused on tax breaks for the oil industry, was not focused on conservation.

Now they have discovered conservation. And a lot of the ideas she proposed were similar to Bush's proposals, the hybrid vehicles and so on. So I do think that the sort of Johnny come lately is to the Bush administration and an answer to your question, how long is it going to take? It's going to take a long time and it's too bad it wasn't addressed four or five or six years ago.

ANGLE: It does seem that the administration and the Democrats, if you take into account Hillary Clinton's views are pretty close on this. I mean, there are some differences in the way Charles is talking about meddling in things. But in terms of the goals and the fuels that people are looking at, at ethanol, for instance, they seem to be headed in the same direction.

EASTON: They seem to be headed in the same direction. I think one of the -- one of the differences is mileage standards. Democrats, environmentalists have been pushing for tougher mileage standards.

ANGLE: Well, some Democrats. Not auto state Democrats.

EASTON: Right. True. But there has been a lot of resistance by the administration.

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": The good news here is that there is a consensus that we need to do something about this urgently. The Bush administration, you never heard it in the first four years of the administration. Never heard anything like we're addicted to oil. All they want to do is pump more and incentivize more production and give tax breaks to oil companies.

Suddenly, the scales have fallen from George Bush's eyes and Dick Cheney's eyes and they see we can't go on the way we are going. That's good.

There are lots of activity in the private sector. General Electric has launched this huge new project to work on energy efficiency. A lot of oil companies - she singles out Exxon as doing negligible amounts of research in alternatives, but there are lots of other energy companies that are deeply into the alternatives.

The good news is that we finally -- and I think there is a consensus that we have to explore lots of different options. The difficulty comes in what options. She doesn't like nuclear. Democrats tend to not like nuclear. They love solar, they love wind.

What we need to do is we need to do it all.

ANGLE: Except in Nantucket.

KONDRACKE: Exactly.

But we need to do it all. We need to drill in ANWR because we are not going to get off oil dependency, so we need to have domestic sources of oil. We need to do nuclear. We also need to be much more efficient in the way we use energy, as she was talking about.

Now she has all this business about how she's going to command the oil companies to devote part of their profits to certain things in this energy fund, which is going to be a government-run thing and on that I think that is too government heavy.

ANGLE: OK. When we come back with our panel we will talk about Iran. President Ahmadinejad is at it again complaining about Israel and making new disclosures about its uranium enrichment program. The panel takes a whack at that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANGLE: And we're back with our panel. Tomorrow in "Der Spiegel," the German magazine, there will be an interview with President Ahmadinejad of Iran in which he says and we are going to show you one of the quotes from this interview, in which he says, "I believe the German people" - that is not actually - "I believe the German" - I want to read the one that we - there we go.

"I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War II. The question is why is it that only Jews are the center of attention."

Charles, he just can't stop talking about the Holocaust.

KRAUTHAMMER: It's interesting that he brings it up so often that you know this is not a fake. This is not something that he is doing for popular or political reasons. He believes it.

It's a way of showing how the Islamic world, particularly Iran, Saudi Arabia and other places, have absorbed the worst kind of anti-Semitism that was once centered in Europe and that Europe after the Holocaust was shamed into abandoning.

But if you look for instance, at the Hamas charter, in Palestine, it has all these conspiracy theories. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the Jews controlling the world, in their charter. This is stuff that is now in the bone and it fuels what is essentially a genocidal policy of destroying and killing the Jews and denying the Holocaust, of course, is the setup.

ANGLE: Nina?

EASTON: It adds the whole nuclear issue being thrown in with this. There is a Naziesque quality to this not only in what he is saying but he is appealing to the resentment of the lower classes in Iran, we're facing an economy in shambles and high unemployment rates, he's trying to sideline the wealthy, powerful class and he is consolidating power, which is pretty frightening.

ANGLE: And Mort he doesn't seem to distinguish between civilians being rounded up and put in concentration camps and being slaughtered form people being killed in combat.

KONDRACKE: Why is it the Jews were the center of attention? Because there was a systematic genocide of the Jews. Of innocent civilians being rounded up and burned, gassed to death and their bodies cremated. That's why.

It's interesting that he would be the first one to remind us of the Crusades, a quote, unquote, "genocide" against Arabs or against Muslims created by the Christians of Europe. That is a constant theme in the resentment. That was 1,000 years ago.

The Holocaust was 50 years ago. This ought to scare the pants off the Europeans. Here we have Hitler in effect, a guy with a Hitlerian mentality about to acquire a nuclear weapon, saying in advance, his "Mein Kampf," is out there, it's not some obscure tract, he's saying that Israel ought to be wiped off the face of the earth and he's developing rockets that not only reach Israel but also Europe as well.

This guy is a menace. And if the Europeans don't realize this and get busy on sanctions, they're going to be accused of appeasing him the way they did Hitler.

ANGLE: You were telling me that he instructs diplomats to lecture?

KONDRACKE: He is consolidating powers as Nina says and he is instructing his diplomats all over the world to question the Holocaust in meetings with like American congressman.

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