One for the Refrigerator Door

You can never go wrong with me calling Californians hypocrites, slackers and elitists. And doing it right to their faces, in the L.A. Times, really takes blue steel cajones.

So you just have to love today’s column by George Skelton, “Let go of the past and allow offshore drilling,” which cuts like a clean ocean breeze through the rhetorical and intellectual fog obscuring energy realities in the Golden State. It's one for the refrigerator door.

The entire column is worth reading, but here’s where Skelton puts it all in context:

"California is the nation's biggest consumer of gasoline -- 45 million gallons a day, plus 10 million gallons of diesel. That makes us the third-biggest petroleum-consuming entity in the world, behind only the United States and China.

We are the nation's No. 3 oil-producing state, behind Texas and Alaska.

But California produces only 39% of the crude oil it uses. An additional 16% comes from Alaska and the remaining 45% is bought from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission.

So there's a gusher of hypocrisy here: The state that is the biggest consumer of gasoline in the nation -- but produces less than 40% of what it uses -- is opposed to drilling for more oil off its shores. We're slackers not pulling our weight."

Bravo, George Skelton, for giving your fellow Californians the spanking they so richly deserve. But the rest of Americans are only a little less confused, deluded and hypocritical -- which makes this a piece of opinion journalism that deserves a wider audience.