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Speaking in Charlotte this afternoon, President Obama was talking about his bogus announcement about offshore drilling for oil this week. He said that we don’t need to start drilling immediately to get relief from high gas prices, because they’re not a big deal.

But the notion that we could drill our way out of the problem -- you'll start hearing about this because you know what happens during the summer. As soon as gas prices start going up, every summer, it's the same thing, right? And politicians start standing up, “We're going do something about it!” And these days, some of my colleagues on the republican side, what they'll say is you've got to drill even more.

So who are these cynical politicians complaining about rising gas prices and saying they’d do something about them? Guess who said this?

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, he was quoted today as saying that he thought it was interesting that gas prices might reach $4 a gallon at the pump. He wasn't aware of it apparently. Let me suggest that as President of the United States I will know if we've got backbreaking prices at the pump, and that I intend to try to do something about it.

Why, that’s Candidate Barack Obama in 2008 complaining about President Bush! He followed up with the following sentence: “This is the kind of attention to the economy that we need from the next President, and George Bush hasn't provided it.” Well, anyone looking at the state of the economy today can see that President Obama clearly is not living up to his standards.

But Obama didn’t stop there, he followed up that enormously hypocritical statement with one of his most clichéd rhetorical technique. He used the false choice of “Drilling everywhere!” or “Drilling nowhere!” to set himself up as a sober, compromise-seeking centrist.

Now, here's the last thing I’ll say about drilling, because what you have is you have some environmentalists who just said don't drill anywhere, and then you've got some of my friends on the Republican side who were saying, well, this is a nice first step but it's not enough.

He’s used the same tactic over and over again on health care, deficit reduction, foreign policy, etc. where he caricatures Republican arguments to make his views seem less extreme. But it’s not the views of Republicans he’s distorting, but those of the American people, who want to increase domestic energy exploration.