Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Is "Drill, baby, drill!" a good slogan?

I've been trying to find out who thought it a good idea to use the phrase "Drill, baby, drill!" as a political slogan.

Both Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have used the slogan in recent days to mark their commitment to unrestricted and unfettered domestic oil production, and at one point the Republican National Convention crowd took up the refrain, because that's the kind of puerile simplistic sound bite they like there (remember "Lock her up!"?) Paradoxically, this comes in spite of the much more measured ambitions of the country's top oil producers in recent years.

Setting aside the slang meaning of "drill" to mean sexual intercourse or gang murder, It seems the phrase was first used as recently as 2008 to express the Republicans' blanket and unquestioning support for the oil and gas industry. Sarah Palin made use of it in her Vice Presidential debate in that year, although she didn't actually coin it. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, environmentalists parodied it as "Spill, baby, spill!" and "Kill, baby, kill!"

I assume it is based on the 1976 disco hit by The Trammps: "Burn, baby, burn, Disco Inferno", although I have no proof of that. But it seems a bit of an unlikely 21st century meme to take hold. Unless you stop to think that the demographic of today's Republicans skews quite hard toward the disco era.

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