Leadership Quote by Bob Ney

The sentence is a masterclass in political ventriloquism: Bob Ney throws his voice into the public’s irritation while keeping his own fingerprints off the problem. “Along with you” is the tell. It’s less solidarity than stagecraft, a quick bid to sound like a fellow commuter stuck at the pump, not a lawmaker with levers, votes, and donors. He doesn’t just acknowledge pain; he claims shared eyewitness status, as if gasoline prices are a natural disaster the nation collectively “witnessed,” not a policy-sensitive market shaped by regulation, refinery capacity, geopolitical risk, and corporate behavior.

The phrasing carefully arranges causality to reduce accountability. Prices “accompanied” summer driving season, as if demand spikes are as inevitable as humidity. Then comes the Katrina clause, a ready-made external villain. Hurricane Katrina (2005) was genuinely disruptive to Gulf Coast energy infrastructure, but invoking it does rhetorical work beyond explanation: it frames the spike as an act of nature, not a failure of preparedness, grid resilience, strategic reserves management, or political will.

Notice what’s absent: agency, remedies, or even a hint of conflict over who profits in a crisis. “Unfortunate rise” is emotion without indictment. By choosing passive, weather-report language, Ney signals concern while avoiding promises that could be measured later. In the mid-2000s, as post-9/11 geopolitics and domestic energy debates churned, this kind of sentence functioned as a pressure-release valve: validating anger, redirecting blame to seasons and storms, and buying time without committing to structural change.