Johnston J. Bennett Jr. Quotes
When I go down in my state, I see virtually none of the independent oil producers for [President Jimmy] Carter … We’ve gotten higher drilling rig counts, more dollars being spent, more activity, more profits being made by oil people than ever before. But do they like Carter? Oh no. they hate him because of his rhetoric.
30 years later, the same situation existed with Barack Obama as President. The independent oil producers also were doing very well, but the President’s rhetoric was not what they wanted to hear, just as they reacted to President Carter in 1982. He told Americans to conserve energy—not what oil men wanted to hear.
J. Bennett Johnston Jr., U. S. Senator (Democrat, LA), Describing the political preferences of Louisiana, 1982
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The ad was prepared by American Renewal, the political lobbying wing of the FRC. This quotation would be typical of the political technique of using the most tenuous, remote connection between a politician of the opposing party and a really evil world villain that was so commonly used by conservative politicians at the time. However, what makes the quotation even more noteworthy is that there is an equally tenuous connection between the Family Research Council's Focus on Families as defined in its charter and the subject of the ad–drilling for oil in the environmentally fragile areas of the Anwar of Alaska. Some of the FRC officials justify their getting into this issues as the drilling could help the economy and that will create jobs and then families will have more resources to spend for nutrition, education, health care etc. With that logic, there is nothing in politics that would be beyond their purview so why have a charter and a mission at all?
Paul Douglas of Illinois was a world famous economist before he was elected to the Senate. He was a constant opponent of a tax loophole known as the "oil depletion allowance." Lyndon Johnson was a proponent of the allowance:. the home county of Chicago
