Got Gas?

A post script to this past weekend this morning, Bush. Plus a little more. First off, I want to tell you about my car. Last March, after a five-month wait--the waiting period for these vehicles has to tell you something about the demand for them, no?--I finally took delivery of a brand new, beautiful black Toyota Prius. I had been driving an S-Type Jaguar, and very proud of it. But I have to tell you, Bush, while I have owned quite a number of cars in the course of my life, I've never been quite so pleased and proud as I am of my Toyota Prius.

It allows me to feel a little morally superior, too, as I drive along the highway. Because it's a hybrid, in case you didn't know. Imagine this: on my weekend jaunt up into the mountains, uphill all the way for ninety miles, I averaged more than forty miles to the gallon. The whole trip, there and back, counting the down grade on the way home: forty-eight point seven m.p.g.! And they say you don't get the full potential mileage until you reach seven or eight thousand miles! I'm not there yet.

All of which, of course, brings me to my point: that automobile energy conservation is more than just a possibility. It's a reality. And yet, so far as I can tell, Bush, you have done absolutely nothing to promote it. On the contrary, it's just another area where you have chosen not to serve our national interest, but rather to treat us as a pathetic bunch of dutiful consumers--and shame on us, for accepting that role. Four years after the fact, we still don't know what went on between your Cheney and those energy barons he gathered together to decide on a national energy policy. The gall of it, really! Setting national policy in consultation only with those who stand to benefit from it! And then keeping it secret, refusing to divulge even who attended or what was discussed!

If this is your vision of democracy, Bush, I'm outraged. And we're still learning more about the Enron conspiracy to max out their profits while gleefully gouging California consumers. Are we expected to believe that, if this happened once, and was exposed, it is not happening still, undisclosed, elsewhere, all the time?

We need an energy policy, Bush. One that we can all get behind and make what sacrifices we need to make. You make political hay by raising the alarm on a Social Security "crisis" that looms forty years from now. The finite resources of fossil fuel energy are rapidly being depleted, and this crisis is with us NOW. We need a clearly stated policy--and one that does not count exclusively on making money for your oil company buddies by raping both our own national resources and our natural environment. We need one that doesn't continually feed the coffers of those despotic regimes you claim to want to reform into democracies; or to countries--think Iran, think Saudi Arabia--without whose active support those terrorists with whom you claim to be at war would soon be out of business. And in the case of Iran at least, are turning their profits from our oil dependency into the very weapons of mass destruction you claim to want to protect us from.

Is it not another terrible irony, Bush, that your energy policy--such as I have to surmise it to be--does nothig but foster everything you claim to be fighting in this world? Again, at inordinate expense.

Now, adding insult to injury, the political powers here in California are talking about a tax-by-the-mile system, for the upkeep of a highway infrastructure now under severe stress as the results of the popular tax revolt of the 1970s come home to roost. And we here in this country still whine incessantly about paying $2 a gallon for gasoline, where most of the world has to cough up three times that amount. If talk turns to action on this tax-by-the-mile issue, Bush, I might as well trade in my Toyota Prius and go out and buy myself a Hummer. I might need the protection when the real revolution comes!

A word in your ear, Bush: conservation. And a second word: now.