Cracks in the facade?

Are we starting to see some fissures in the across-the-board-Bush-love among corporate sectors? An AP report for January 8:

Washington - The U.S. airline industry accused the Bush administration Thursday of recklessly driving up the cost of oil by purchasing unnecessarily large amounts of petroleum for the nation's strategic reserves at a time when prices are already high.

"The government is out buying fuel, it appears, without much regard for the impact that it is having on prices,'' said James C. May, the chief executive of the Air Transport Association, the industry's main lobbying group.

May, speaking to a group of reporters at the association's headquarters in Washington, said oil purchases made by the Energy Department were adding enough demand to the world marketplace to drive up the price of oil by more than $6 per barrel....

The Energy Department is in the process of filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, now at 638 million barrels, to its capacity of 700 million barrels.

Meantime, the nation's commercially available inventory of crude, which traders watch closely to gauge whether supplies are adequate, is 3 percent below last year's levels. For the week ending Jan. 2, commercial supplies stood at 269.0 million barrels, down from 277.5 million barrels a year earlier.

Just wondering here: The drive to fill the reserve came in the wake of September 11 and associated fears of a major disruption in oil supplies. That disruption never happened and in the wake of the Iraq war, supplies seem pretty well assured. So what is the purpose of all these purchases now, when all they serve to do is keep the price of oil up?

Oh, wait....