"The awl bidness"

James Ridgeway's "Mondo Washington" column offers an important addendum to Woodward's on-again, off-again claim that the Saudis have agreed to keep a lid on oil prices to benefit Bush. The key observation:


If the Saudis decided to let the so-called free market take over, flooding the globe with crude and sending oil prices into a steep dive, then the U.S. would be faced with a true nightmare. Lower prices would finish off not only smaller international companies that had been enticed into the oil play by high prices, but could wipe out the domestic oil companies in the U.S., causing sheer political hell for President Bush in his little oil bastion of Houston.