A strange thing happened when we all were least expecting it. The so-called paper of record, The New York Times, actually reported some facts for a change. And even more amazingly, some of these facts make Obama out to be the anti-energy president and praise George W. Bush for having the foresight to set the groundwork for our current homegrown energy boom.

On Thursday, March 22, the Times wrote a piece about how the U.S. is slowly “inching toward energy independence” and rightly noted that much of this is due to the work of one President George W. Bush!

The piece explains how the high cost of oil has opened up new vistas in the United States that were once far too expensive to bother tapping. From fracking, to oil sands, to employing new, more difficult drilling techniques, the technology for reaching these harder to get at oil reserves — of which the US has a tremendous amount — has developed at a quicker clip due to the fact that oil is no longer extremely cheap. But there was also a helping hand from Washington D.C. during the Bush years.

As the Times properly notes:

The Bush administration worked from the start on finding ways to unlock the nation’s energy reserves and reverse decades of declining output, with Mr. Cheney leading a White House energy task force that met in secret with top oil executives.

These measures primed the pump for the burst in drilling that began once oil prices started rising sharply in 2005 and 2006. With the world economy humming — and China, India and other developing nations posting astonishing growth — demand for oil began outpacing the easily accessible supplies.

…The Bush administration also opened large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico and the waters off Alaska to exploration, granting lease deals that required companies to pay only a tiny share of their profits to the government.

These measures primed the pump for the burst in drilling that began once oil prices started rising sharply in 2005 and 2006. With the world economy humming — and China, India and other developing nations posting astonishing growth — demand for oil began outpacing the easily accessible supplies.

Amusingly, the Times was forced to note that today’s energy situation seems to be “a far cry” from the landscape that Obama promised to sculpt when he was running for office in 2007. The Times notes that Obama “campaigned on a pledge to shift toward renewable energy and away from fossil fuels,” but is now singing a different tune.

The increased production of fossil fuels is a far cry from the energy plans President Obama articulated as a candidate in 2008. Then, he promoted policies to help combat global warming, including vast investments in renewable energy and a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that would have discouraged the use of fossil fuels.

Yes, suddenly, Obama has turned on a dime and is now holding faux press conferences to announce that he’s the nouveau Pipeline-loving president. And his extremist, left-wing bas ain’t happy about it, neither!

Mr. Obama’s current policy has alarmed many environmental advocates who say he has failed to adequately address the environmental threats of expanded drilling and the use of fossil fuels. He also has not silenced critics, including Republicans and oil executives, who accuse him of preventing drilling on millions of acres off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts and on federal land, unduly delaying the decision on the full Keystone project and diverting scarce federal resources to pie-in-the-sky alternative energy programs.

The Times also points out that Obama came to office canceling all sorts of oil projects making us more dependent on foreign oil. But facing the high cost of gasoline, and in an election year at that, Obama is starting to turn away from his hate for American energy independence.

His administration initially canceled some oil and gas leases on federal land awarded during the Bush administration and required more environmental review. But in a world where crucial oil suppliers like Venezuela and Libya were unstable and high energy prices could be a drag on a weak economy, he soon acted to promote more drilling. Despite a drilling hiatus after the 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 rig workers and spilled millions of barrels of crude oil into the ocean, he has proposed expansion of oil production both on land and offshore. He is now moving toward approving drilling off the coast of Alaska.

This must pain the Times something fierce.

But, even while the Times did poke a few holes in Obama’s claims that he has flip flipped from being anti-energy independence to pro, the Times still does not explicitly point out that Obama is not responsible for any of the current new oil production in the USA. Nor does the Times properly point out that the segment of the Keystone Pipeline he claimed he fast tracked last week was already in the works and he had precisely nothing to do with it. The fact is, even with Obama’s sudden pro-oil rhetoric, he’s still done more to destroy the oil industry and our energy independence than any president in history.

But it is in keeping with the destruction he is hoping to continue for another four years after November 2012. Obama only wants to look like he’s trying to increase oil production while not actually doing anything. It’s just another false front lie by the most anti-American president in American history.