I’m sitting in my hotel room in Chiang Mai, Thailand watching The O’Reilly Factor. I might as well have been watching Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! The content was almost indistinguishable. O’Reilly and Dobbs were saying that Obama should be taking more coercive action than he’s taking. Against whom? Oil companies.

Both O’Reilly and Dobbs emphasized that U.S. oil companies don’t own the oil they think they own. Who owns it? We do, according to O’Reilly and Dobbs. And not we, as in you and me, but we, as in the U.S. government. Dobbs advocated “jaw-boning” oil companies into charging lower prices. He also advocated some kind of government slush trust fund that the oil companies would fund with a special tax.

Both O’Reilly and Dobbs got upset about oil companies exporting gasoline. So, based on this and other O’Reilly/Dobbs pronouncements, exports of oil products are bad, exports of other products are good, and imports of almost everything are bad. They must have a very interesting economic model. I think they share it with Donald Trump.