"Drill Baby Drill"... WTF?

I did not stay up to watch the GOP convention this past week. I therefore did not have the opportunity to watch the infamous "Drill baby drill" chants that peppered parts of the convention. Climate Progress has a short post about the chant:

Yes, the delegates to one of the two major political parties were chanting for crack cocaine to feed an addiction that is destroying the economic health of this country, strengthening our enemies, jeopardizing our security, and ultimately posing “an existential threat to civilization” itself. With apoligies to T. S. Eliot:

This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a chant of “Drill, baby, Drill.”

Treehugger also noted the chant from the crowd of GOPpers:

At the risk of sounding repetitive, clean coal simply doesn’t exist and throwing more money into that fire won’t make it happen. It’s simply an expensive distraction from getting the United States off fossil fuels and onto other energy sources as quickly as possible.
Ditto for offshore oil drilling: There certainly is oil in protected areas, but by every measurement there simply isn’t that much there and what is there will have so little impact on the price or availability of oil by the time it enters the market that the only people who will benefit from it are oil companies. The price consumers pay may drop slightly, but not significantly. The persistent call of “drill baby drill” heard throughout the speech is just the sound of junkies looking for a fix.

I think I have to agree with both of these blog groups: the chant of "drill baby drill" is much like the sound of drug junkies seeking a fix. I also agree with their prior analyses showing that there will not be any immediate benefit to domestic fuel costs from drilling, because it is unlikely that more deposits of significance will be found.

True, the chants of "Si se puede" and "Yes we can" at the DNC convention were similarly ravenous. Both of them have these strong rhythmic punctuation that - when echoed by several thousand people - is intoxicating to our brains (especially when we are one of the throbbing mass of verbal exhortation). However, one major difference is that these chants are rather affirmative of our innate ability to do stuff, rather than a chant for something to be given to us. For a party which has (or used to have) personal accomplishment as one of its core principles, the GOPpers at the convention sure seemed a lot like the people waiting for a handout that they so despise.