Presented for your consideration:
*Matt Welch and Kevin Drum try to make something of the idea that President Bush struck some sort of secret deal with the Saudis to drive down oil prices before the elections (which, as James Joyner notes, is pretty much what John Kerry was critizing the Bush Administration for not doing only a few weeks ago).
*QandO and Captain Ed think the story doesn’t add up to much when you put it in perspective and consider the source.
What intrigued me about this whole story, though, is that only a month ago, in a widely-discussed piece, Ed Lasky was arguing precisely the opposite: that the Saudis were deliberately using high oil prices to squeeze the economy to try to get Bush out of office.
The truth? Hard to say. Although I’ve long since concluded that Occam’s Razor, especially when applied along criteria we in the West would understand, does not apply to the motivations of the Saudi regime, given the byzantine internal politics of the Saudi royal family.