What is the matter with Nancy Pelosi? Does she actually want to help the Republicans advance their right wing pro-pollution agenda?

Over the last few weeks, the price of crude oil has been going down – and with no new offshore drilling. The price of gasoline has gone down too, and it’s because Americans have decided that they will conserve energy rather than keep on pumping money into the bank accounts of greedy oil companies.

The only justification Republicans have had for offshore drilling has been that it’s needed to reduce the price of gasoline. Even that is a bogus argument, as the Department of Energy calculates that any new oil from expanded offshore drilling would not even arrive on the market for many, many years from now. The economic impact of expanded drilling through offshore oil rigs would be tiny – only a few pennies off the price of gasoline at the pump.

The environmental impact of offshore drilling is huge, however. Hundreds of oil spills already come from current offshore drilling rigs every decade, and the number of oil spills would be magnified with new drilling. Furthermore, even if oil spills themselves never ever took place, there would still be dangerous pollution of America’s ocean waters, with heavy metals, radioactive materials and even arsenic brought up with subsurface muds. Those poisons would go into America’s seafood, harming humans, not just marine organisms.

Nancy Pelosi once stood against offshore oil drilling, but yesterday she indicated that she will probably support it. Why? Pelosi thinks that she’s making a smart deal, and helping Democrats get elected to Congress.

That’s some mighty dim-witted calculus. As the price of gasoline goes down, the Republicans’ twisted logic for expanded offshore oil drilling becomes increasingly incoherent. At the very least, Nancy Pelosi should seek to delay a vote on offshore drilling. Time is on the side of the opponents of new drilling.

But no, it seems that the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives is ready to surrender just when the timing is right to put up a fight. Nancy Pelosi is now agreeable to allowing a special session of Congress just in order to help the Republicans rush offshore drilling through, without time for the American public to wake up from its summer vacation and realize what’s going on. Pelosi is offering terrible leadership and betraying the environmental values of her constituents. Cindy Sheehan is looking more and more like a reasonable alternative to Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi is wimping out. She’s caving in to Big Oil, but that doesn’t mean you have to. If Pelosi won’t lead the Democrats in the House of Representatives to speak for us, then we can speak for ourselves.

Start out with this political button, which declares the truth about politicians who cave in to the demands of oil corporations: Oil drilling is for wimps who are too weak to stand up for what’s right.