The Stockholm syndrome: It's not just for those with guns to their heads anymore

A good one from my friend, Jeff Gardner (Right for a Reason):

Perhaps you're old enough to remember the kidnapping of little rich-girl Patti Hearst by something called the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Hearst, heiress to her father's publishing fortune, went from captive to sympathizer to bank robber during her tenure with the SLA. The security camera image of her holding a submachine gun during the bank heist has become nothing short of iconic.

Going from kidnapping victim to kidnapper lover, as Hearst did, is referred to as the Stockholm syndrome. It's believed that if we're held hostage long enough we become sympathetic or even enamored with our captors and don't see them for the ruthless cutthroats they truly are.

Today, then, I suggest that we, the great citizens of the United States, are suffering from mass Stockholm syndrome, held hostage as we've been by what we've come to generically term the environmental movement. Or, as I refer to them, America's eco-Marxists.

They haven't yet held guns to our heads, but America's eco-Marxists have used scare tactics, verbal and physical attacks, random acts of violence and property destruction, and win-at-all costs intolerance campaigns to make us subservient to their every whim.

Their assault on our lifestyle is as remarkable as it is unprecedented. The concerted effort needed to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II, as impressive and successful as it was, pales in the reflection of the eco-Marxists' Mao-like campaign to not only influence our way of life, but, ultimately control it.

Setting the notion of man-made global warming aside for the moment, let's delve into our dependence upon Arab sheiks and South American tyrants/friends of Bill Richardson. The Saudi Royal family and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could find no better friends than America's rabid environmentalists.

Did you know that the debate over drilling into a remote, relatively miniscule piece of land in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) began over 25 years ago? In 1980, James Earl Carter signed legislation that set aside more than 100 million acres of Alaska, serving to help protect caribou, polar bears, and the arctic fox among other things.

There was, however, tucked away in that piece of legislation, an agreement to open 1.5 million acres specifically for oil exploration. And oil there is.

But the eco-Marxists -- who had declared victory over nuclear energy by this time -- set their sights on cutting off our domestic oil and gas supply. You may as well lump coal in that mix as well. Lump coal. Get it? Forgive me.

It's ironic, of course, that when the ANWR debate first began, critics harped, "It will be years before we see any relief from drilling there." I'm guessing we would be enjoying some of the relief today.

Certainly drilling and mining carry risks. Oil spills, uranium tailings pools seeping into ground water, collapsing mine shafts, nuclear core melt downs -- all are pulled like arrows from eco-Marxists' quivers to strike fear into our hearts.

But we run a greater risk right now allowing the hostage crisis to continue. Nearly every nation we're shackled to for oil is stained by political corruption and oppression.

They seem to rejoice in the misery oil and gas prices have foisted upon our economy.

If we're going to set ourselves on a course of energy independence, then we must -- at least for the short term -- access our domestic supplies. We can build in sunset rules, but we must drill, as safely as possible, in northern New Mexico, off the coasts of Texas, Florida and California, and in ANWR.

And we must bring the French advances in nuclear power to bear here.

First, though, we need to fend off the eco-Marxists. We have the perfect weapon: reality. It trumps Utopia every time.