We're Number Forty-Two

The failed attack on the Saudi Arabian oil facility last week has analysts shouting that we must move quickly to find alternatives to our massive dependence on petroleum. They’re absolutely correct in this, of course, but President Bush’s band aid program looks very piddling.

No longer as important, since we’re stuck with the decision, is the national twenty-twenty hindsight view – although in my own defense I foresaw it and said so to all my family and friends – that we took our eye off the ball of hunting down al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and diverted our military and fiscal resources to Iraq, a nation that had nothing to due with the precipitous cause of our rage, 9/11.

We are now caught in the middle of a family squabble between tribes in Iraq from which it appears we cannot easily or quickly extricate ourselves. Our military deaths in that country are closing in on the number killed in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and our wounded and seriously disabled are in the tens of thousands. Treasure is harder to calculate, but it is likely that Iraq is likely to cost us in excess of a trillion dollars before we can stop the tally.

Let me recapitulate, al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations continue to plot against us and our allies in the Islamic world. Our military is stretched thin in Iraq. Our casualties mount. Our treasure disappears in the desert sand. And our economy is endangered by the terrorists who are training daily to disrupt our oil supplies.

But not to worry, the energy plan on the table will make it possible for us to withstand such a terrorist success in only fifteen years. But, of course, that plan doesn’t even hint at the price spike likely to result – and to persist - from any major failure in the world petroleum market – now or then.

Even Republicans are waking up to the calamitous policies and inept responses of this administration. But, it’s too late for them. We must fire them in the bi-election and then elect a Democrat president in ’08. Sadly, the Dems are likely to read this as a mandate to turn both leftward and inward.

Both members of the Herbert Hoover fan club are ecstatic with their hero’s prospects for moving up to next to last in all time presidential rankings. Thanks, George!

Blog on!

Wild Bill