You sit there in your heartache
waiting for some beautiful boy to
save you from your old ways
you play forgiveness, watch it now, here he comes
he doesn't look a thing like Jesus
but he talks like a gentleman
like you imagined when you were young...
           -- The Killers, "When You Were Young"

During the primaries, Barack Obama talked to us like a gentleman.  He may not have looked like Jesus, but nonetheless, he walked on water, healed the lame, drove the moneylenders from the Temple, and raised the dead. 

But that was during the primaries, when this political season was young.  Now the primaries are over, and Barack Obama wants all of us to know that he doesn't look a thing like Jesus, and if we're looking for a Messiah, we need to look elsewhere. 

Obama took us all badly aback when he recorded a radio ad supporting U.S. Representative Jack Barrow of Georgia, a white conservative Democrat much despised by the more liberal-progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Obama's support for Barrow was especially hard to take given that Barrow is being strongly challenged for his seat by Georgia state Senator Regina Thomas, a strongly liberal-progressive black woman running in a district that is predominantly African-American.

Disappointment is perhaps inevitable when a mass of people look up to any political candidate with as much hope, admiration, and respect as we have showered on Senator Obama.  Even the best of us are only human, after all.  And it is a supposedly inevitable truth of how our political system works that a candidate cultivates the fringes of their own particular political base while seeking the nomination, and then moves back to the middle once they have it. 

Yet Senator Obama was supposed to be the candidate of change, the politician who was writing a new book, finding a new path, and forging a new political truth.  This was the package we were presented with, and that half or more of us bought eagerly and enthusiastically throughout the primary season.  Obama was the Prince of the Rising Tide, the King of Wishful Thinking, the New Hope.  

Well, now the Empire is striking back. 

There can be little doubt that Obama's support of John Barrow, as conservative a Democrat as any Democrat has ever been, over Regina Thomas, is an act of the most cynical political calculation.   Barrow is going into his third term in the House of Representatives, and his IOU is going to be worth more to President Obama than that of a freshman Representative with no seniority.  

Yet there's also a message in Obama's method here, and that signal is a strong one.  He's saying to all of us who consider ourselves to be his constituency and his base, especially those of us out here who may share his ethnicity -- don't count on me just because you think I'm one of you. 

This is, perhaps, a reassuring dog whistle to many white moderates -- Obama will not necessarily put the interests of an African-American first simply because they are African-American, like he is.  But it's a savage disappointment  to those of us who were hoping for transcendental decision-making from this man who would be President.

Hard though Obama's decision to support Barrow over Thomas may be for all of us, it's easy medicine to swallow compared to Obama's even more recent announcement of support for the travesty of a FISA bill that has just passed in the House.  At this point all those of us who, like Fox Mulder, still want to believe are clinging desperately to Obama's assurances that he "will work in the Senate to remove [retroactive immunity for the tel-coms] so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses". 

Yet those of us with any kind of ear for political parsing can already smell the weakness of this non-promise.  If Obama truly meant to do everything in his power to keep retroactive immunity from becoming law, he would have at the very least thrown in a 'hard' or a 'diligently' after the word 'work' to signal that intention.  As it is, it seems obvious that this promise is an empty one, intended only to provide political cover to Obama later on.

Anyone can run the numbers and see why Obama has made this decision.  With a majority of his own party backing this contemptible law for contemptible reasons of their own, hard opposition to it would only leave him vulnerable to accusations from the McCain campaign of being out of step with even his own base... something that might well hurt him, perhaps mortally, with those key moderates and undecideds that inevitably seem to decide every national American election in a nation as continually polarized as ours is.
. 
And yet, again... we were led to believe we could expect more than this from Mr. Obama of Illinois.  New directions.  Real leadership.  Change We Can Believe In.

Endorsing an undesirably conservative incumbent over a solidly progressive challenger in order to secure a political IOU is not change we can believe in.  Weak, blustering non-assurances regarding  lip service opposition to yet more utterly odious incursions into American civil liberties is certainly not a new direction or any sort of real leadership.  This is nothing more than coldly calculated compromise, and nothing less  than rank capitulation to the worst and basest elements in our current political discourse.

It's failure, pure and simple... which is, sadly and grimly, politics as usual for the Democratic Party.  The politics as usual that Senator Obama of Illinois keeps telling us we are leaving behind, once and for all... but apparently, not right now, and not real soon. 

Maybe Change We Can Believe In means no real change at all.

Ever. 

Or maybe there will be a new era of post partisan politics and government transparency, of new directions and real leadership... in a galaxy far, far away.

I still think Senator Obama was a better choice for the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton, and is a better choice for the American people than John McCain.

But I'm starting to wonder if there wasn't, or isn't, a better choice than Senator Obama still out there somewhere. 

They say the devil's water
it ain't so sweet
you don't have to drink right now
but you can dip your feet
every once in a little while....

The Democratic Party's recent utter capitulation on FISA, illegal surveillance, and retroactive immunity for the tel-coms infuriates me.  Senator Obama's apparently willing, even enthusiastic collaboration with this craven compliance on the part of his party enrages me further.  But, honestly, I don't know why I really expected anything else...

Over here, back in December of 2006, some Democrat hack/policy wonk named Chris Bowers compiled a list of all the reasons why Democrats should not and will not try to impeach that idiot some Americans have been erroneously and gullibly referring to as 'President' for the last six years.

That was a year and a half ago, and careful observers will notice that  to date, the newly empowered Democratic majority in Congress had apparently treated this list as if it were Holy Scripture, handed down from on high by the very hand of God Itself.

It's an impressive list, certainly -- one that reeks of reasonableness, of 'reality', of compromise, of political expedience, of being cautious and preserving political capital and thinking long term and carefully mapping out the '08 campaign season and all that other colonic end product the Dems sob like little babies over whenever they somehow stumble, spasm, and/or drunkenly flail their way into a position to actually do anything that might make a significant difference as to how our country is governed.

::DEEP breath::

I cannot tell you how sick I am of this crybaby crap. "Oh, now that we're in a position where we can actually do something, we can't, we mustn't, we shan't REALLY do anything, because then, you know, we might not get re-elected and we'd have to find real jobs."

Why is it that the only politicians in America who have the balls to get into office and actively and effectively pursue an agenda are, you know, evil?

I know, I know. The Democratic majority is still razor thin, and the Republicans can and will be obstructive, and any kind of forward motion on a Democratic/liberal/progressive agenda will take very careful management, and there are no words to describe how tired I am of hearing this teenie-weenie L'il Rascals otay 'panky CRAP. The Republicans had a razor thin majority for ten years, and they have very nearly destroyed the entire planet, and gotten filthy frickin rich while doing it. Why can't the Democrats be similarly aggressive about their own agenda? Honestly, someone explain it to me. I really don't understand it.

Here's my list of just some of the reasons why those evil bastards Bush and Cheney SHOULD both be impeached --

* They aren't really President and Vice President of the United States of America. They were never actually elected; they committed the most brazen election fraud ever seen on a national scale in our country's history, they have no right to those titles or those offices.

* There are 600,000 dead people in Iraq right now who would be alive if Bush and Cheney hadn't decided to go break their country.

* They're spying on American citizens in explicit defiance of the law. They don't even deny it.  They're proud of it.

* They are holding American citizens for years without trial or even indictment, on no authority other than Presidential whim.

* They are torturing prisoners of war. They think it's fun.

* They have committed nearly innumerable counts of systematic fraud to enrich their corporate sponsors in shameful ways, mostly off mountains of bodies, of those both dead and living on in utter misery, here in America (see: New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina) and abroad (see, again, Iraq).

That last point could be broken down into literally hundreds of sub-points; I just don't have the time to actually compile a list of all the ways the Bush Administration has illegally funneled billions if not trillions of tax dollars into the private pockets of its corporate favorites over the last six years.

For that matter, the second point could be broken down into 600,000 plus bullet points, if I just knew the names of every single person who has died unnecessarily due to our illegal and immoral invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. And the third and fourth points could have a great many victims' names attached to them, too, if we had the power to compile that kind of comprehensive list.

Against all of this, the learned Mr. Bowers weighs things like "the national image of the two parties", "keep(ing) our caucus close to united", and the fact that he is "not in the mood to blow all of our political capital" on, you know, something as trivial as actually doing the right thing.

Unprofessional though it may well be, the only word that springs to my mind when I read this kind of gutless sobbing and cringing and hand wringing on the part of someone whose party just won a huge national election they were overwhelmingly predicted to lose is, well, asshole. If Democrats are going to act like craven pissy assed losers even when they finally manage to win, what's the point in electing them in the first place?

I mean, I know why they're in it... the job pays pretty well and you don't have to work very much or very hard. But if this is how they're going to act after we vote them in, why do we even bother?

Do I have any positive, realistic, politically expedient advice to offer to these quivering masses of spineless humanoid gelatin? Yeah. Bush's popularity is in the low thirties. The Republican Party in general is foundering under a dinosaur killing meteor strike of multiple financial, ethical, moral, and sexual scandals. All that didn't just spring into existence to get the Dems into office, and it hasn't gone away.

Go after Bush. Nobody likes him anyway, it's the right thing to do, and guess what? A majority of the American people are desperately hoping to see their elected officials actually do what's right for once, instead of what's merely expedient.

Will the Republicans unite to defend Bush from impeachment? Maybe, but they're horribly vulnerable right now. There's a mountain of dirt to sling; the minute any of them open their mouths, start slinging it.

No matter what they say, here's what the Dems say back: Mark Foley. Katrina. Tom DeLay. Jack Abrahamoff. Would you like a page boy with that, Congressman? No? A gay hooker? Some meth? How about a nice fat campaign contribution from an Indian tribe trying to build a casino?

When Rush Limbaugh comes after you, go on his show. Take his calls. Whatever he says, whatever he asks you, you say "Percoset. Viagra. How was the Dominican Republic, Rush? Say, how's Mrs. Limbaugh? Which one? I'm not sure, how many have there been? Lately, I mean." When O'Relly comes after you, bring up loofahs, and ask if he's still sexually harassing his married associate producers. Play hardball. I mean, God agove, they do. Hammer them and hammer them and hammer them until they're as scared to open their mouths and take any kind of real position at all as... ...well, as all our elected Democrats are, actually.

Honest to God. You want to see every registered black voter in America for the next two generations vote Democrat? Stand up on live TV and impeach Bush using the words "depraved indifference to human life" while showing video of him playing his guitar at the exact same moment as people were drowning in New Orleans. That will do it. It's easy.

Seriously, why is this stuff hard? Why do Democrats continually let Bush and the Republicans walk away from things like the debacle in Iraq, the catastrophic cluster fuck that was Katrina, and, while we're at it, the goddam 9/11 attacks? Why does it take a gay page boy scandal to put the opposition party back in power, when the people who have been in power for years previous have monumentally messed up every single thing they have managed to get their hands in, and gotten rich doing it, and everybody knows it, too?

In 2006 the American people handed the Democratic Party  the keys to the country.  It's time they stopped sniveling and did the right thing. And the absolute top priority on that list is, get that murderous bastard the hell out of the Oval Office. And then, second, get our troops the hell out of Iraq. Well, not second, both are equally important. There are a few hundred of you in Congress; you can manage to do two things at once, right?

These things are the right things to do. They also happen to be things that the American people who elected you want you to do. It's a win-win.

Not, of course, that either the right thing to do, or the wishes of the people who elected them, mean anything to the Democratic Party.  Otherwise, they wouldn't have just voted overwhelmingly to give Bush vastly increased surveillance powers, and his corporate accomplices in the telecommunications industry retroactive immunity from all prosecution. 

I have an uncle who is deeply, deeply conservative.  He quite often sends me email forwards.  Usually these are just the standard Rush Limbaugh talking points stuff... Obama is a stealth muslim, Clinton is a dyke, etc, etc... and I just kind of shrug and hit the delete key after I read the first paragraph.

But sometimes he sends me something I just have to get into a little...

Here's the email forward:

Subject: College Liberals

Sometimes, extreme liberal ideals seem much different when their outcomes directly affect you...
==============================================
Father-Daughter Talk
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth.

She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.

One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school.

Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.

Her father listened and then asked, "How is your friend Audrey doing?"

She replied, "Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over."

Her wise father asked his daughter, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA."

The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, "That's a crazy idea, how would that be fair! I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!"

The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, "Welcome to the Republican party."See, I think this is fabulous; a totally cogent summation of every loonie liberal fallacy, elegantly encapsulated in this one utterly brilliant parable near worthy of Jesus.

Still, I think it lacks... I don't know... verisimilitude. Or maybe it's just too brief. Anyway, I think it needs a little something to really bring the truth across. So, let me add just a little more to the narrative, for flavor, if nothing else...
Incensed, the young college student immediately retorted, "What, so you're equating my Grade Point Average, an objective assessment of my effort and abilities within the context of a college curriculum, with actual material wealth and property? You're saying that my straight A average is the academic equivalent of your vastly swollen bankbook? Is that it?"

"Of course," the conservative father said, nodding smugly. "It's exactly the same.  Remember how you insisted on not taking a dime from me because you wanted to get through college on your own? You worked hard for scholarships and got a work study job and studied hard for your grades and resent the idea that someone who hasn't done the same amount of work as you do should get a free ride on your superior talents and greater effort. Well, I've worked hard for the success I enjoy, and like all decent, right thinking, hard working men and women everywhere, I think it's just crazy that I should be expected to give up part of my just earnings to support those who are too lazy to go out and make the same effort to do as well as I have!"

The daughter raised her eyebrows. "Dad, you honestly see no difference between your status in life at the present time and mine? You think they are exactly equitable?"

"Exactly," her father said with assurance. "You've worked hard to get where you are, I've worked hard to get where I am. You deserve your success and I deserve mine. No freeloaders need apply for handouts around here. If your friend Audrey wants a 4.0, she can get off her lazy ass and work for it, just like you did."

"I see," the young woman said. "And similarly, if that homeless man living in a cardboard box in the alley behind the supermarket wants to own his own business like you do, well, he can build a time machine out of old tin cans, travel back to before he was born, and arrange for his mother to marry someone with a million dollar athletic shoe company, so he can start out there as a Vice President when he's 25 and assume control of the whole thing when his dad retires!"

"Wait," the father began to bluster. "That's not... young lady, I worked hard... my grades in college... I graduated near the top of my class... I went to the Harvard School of Business... my management skills when I came into this firm saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars the first year I was here..."

"Daddy," the daughter said, more or less patiently, "you got into Harvard because grampa bought them a new library, and they didn't throw you out when you kept getting drunk and high in your fraternity because grampa bought them three new dorms and a new gymnasium with a pool. You got high grades in most of your classes because you picked really easy classes and hired smart but poor kids to write your papers and take your exams for you. You saved hundreds of thousands of dollars for grampa's shoe company your first year by firing all your American workers and replacing them with kids from Indonesia who did just as good a job for 12 cents an hour."

"But," her father tried to say. His daughter was having none of it; she went on relentlessly, "Daddy, there is no comparison between the way I earn my grades and the way you've 'earned' your success in life. I got into a good school based only on my own grades and SATs, which I got the hard way, by working. I pay my own tuition. I get all As in college because I work my ass off. Remember how you offered to get me into Harvard by endowing some new faculty lounge for them? That's how you do things. I didn't need you to do that for me; I got into my school fair and square. And where you do things like send your hot new 25 year old trophy wife to sleep with Senators for government contracts, then sell shoes to the military for $2,000 a pair that cost you $1.50 each because they're put together in a South Korean sweatshop and made out of pressed cardboard, I actually study and actually turn in my work and actually get perfect scores on my exams because I'm smart and I work hard."

The girl's father looked up alertly as that. "Say, hon, speaking of sleeping with Senators for government contracts, you don't look so bad in a black cocktail dress yourself. I was wondering..."

The young woman flashed her father a furious glare which stopped him dead. She took a breath, then went on, "Plus, I can't understand why you get so pissy about so called 'high taxes on the wealthy' anyway, when you pay your accountant six figures a year to make sure most of your real income and property go through offshore accounts and you end up paying less income tax than a public school teacher!"

"It... I..." the father looked baffled for a moment -- then shrugged and spread his hands. "Honey, that's just how the real world works. Some day you'll understand."

"I understand now, dad," she said. "I understand that your wealth and success and social status all derive from the labor of other people who work for you, whom you pay as little as you possibly can to maximize your own profits. I understand that you cheat, steal, lie, bribe, exploit, and connive at every opportunity to maximize your own assets at the expense of everyone around you. I understand this very well, because I hacked your computer last weekend and have all of this on disc and in hard copy, and I've already sent it all over to the IRS and the FBI, and I think I passed a couple of guys with warrants on my way up to your office today. They should be knocking on your door any second now."

The father's eyes went wide. "What? What? Well... well, that's ridiculous! It's not fair! I have rights! That's an illegal search! You've invaded my privacy!"

The wise... far too wise... daughter sighed. "Yeah, dad. Welcome to the Democratic Party."
Now, there are people... and mind you, I know 'em... who would take enormous umbrage at this characterization of every hard working Republican as basically being inherently corrupt scions of privilege who started out with huge advantages due to the circumstances of their births, and who have employed any means, fair or foul, to advance their own personal agenda and maintain and increase their own personal wealth ever since.

Here's what I say to that : there may well be honest, hard working Republicans in America. However, when the leadership of the Republican party is indeed, and inarguably, almost entirely comprised of inherently corrupt scions of privilege who started out with huge advantages due to the circumstances of their birth and who have employed any means, fair or foul, to advance their own personal agendas and maintain and increase their own personal wealth for their entire adult lives and throughout their careers in so called 'public service'... well... the honest, hard working Republicans, whoever they may be and wherever the hell they may be hiding, are just going to have to sit down and shut up for a while. I have no sympathy.

If there are conservatives or Republicans out there who aren't corrupt, venal, evil, hypocritical sonsofbitches -- they need to stop voting for the corrupt, venal, evil, hypocritical sonsofbitches.

It's as simple as that.

According to Wikipedia, "The U.S. federal gasoline tax as of 2005 was 18.4¢/gal (4.86¢/L), and the gasoline taxes in the various states range from 10 cents to 33 cents, with an average about 22 cents per U.S. gallon (5.8¢/L). Unlike most goods in the U.S., the price displayed includes all taxes, rather than being calculated at the point of purchase."

I can't be sure whether that very broad estimate on state gasoline taxes is also assumed to include county taxes as well. I do know, however, from several years I spent working as a typist in the Tampa City Clerk's Office, that many counties also levy a fuel tax. Certainly, Hillsborough County, where I lived for seven years or so, does.

Then, over here, we find that there were a total of 234,624 vehicles registered in the U.S. in 2002, which consumed 167,730 million gallons of fuel.

That's $30,862,340,000 -- thirty billion, eight hundred sixty two million, three hundred and forty thousand dollars for the Federal government every year from gasoline taxes.

It's also an average of $36,900,600,000 -- thirty six billion, nine hundred million, six hundred thousand dollars on average for each state, per year, from fuel taxes.

This is why, when our newly elected Democrats told us in 2006 that they were going to commit to alternate energy sources, the sanest thing one could have done is laugh hysterically. It's as bad as "I'm from the government, I'm here to help". Our government makes tens of billions of dollars per year off our cultural addiction to, as they like to call it in that old TV theme song, "Texas tea". Would you believe a random stranger who walked up to you on the street and said "I'm making thirty billion dollars a year off people like you buying home heating oil from my company, and now, out of the goodness of my heart, I'm going to invest a hundred billion into figuring out ways for you to heat your home that won't require you to buy my product any more?"

But, you know, our government isn't a business, and isn't all about personal profit. The men and women who we elect to high office are honorable and ethical people, and... huh... hwuh... bwah... ha ha HO HA HA HO HEEEEEEE....

Sorry, I had to stop typing for a minute and get myself back under control again. I'm okay now... >snort< >guffaw<

Okay. And leaving all that aside, while government may not be, on paper, about personal profit (riiiiiiiiiiiight), the fact of the matter is, government is about raising money and then spending it on programs that, supposedly, help the public. There's never enough money to go around to all the programs that the public wants to have funded (mostly because our government insists on spending trillions on programs none of us would want funded if we knew about them, but leave that aside for the moment, too), so it's simply insane and absurd to believe that our government is ever going to wean us off the gas teat while it's making them so much tax revenue, at every level -- local, county, state, and Federal.

We'll see alternate fuel sources become viable and commonly accessible when the government figures out (a) one that works and (b) one that can make them at least forty billion dollars a year in tax revenue. Let us never forget Westinghouse's infamous question to Tesla -- "Where do I put the meter?" If you can't sell it by the cubic foot to a willing target demographic, it's just not worth investing development capital in.

That, at least, is politics as usual. Perhaps President Obama will be different. Certainly John McCain won't... but let us always remember, if America doesn't buy gasoline any more, that's around $30 to $40 billion dollars a year the government isn't coercing out of our pockets any more. That's good news for us, but a pretty big fiscal shortfall for government on every level to have to make up. Where's it going to come from?

Somehow or other, it's going to come from where it always comes from -- We, The People. Heinlein's cruelest law, TANSTAAFL*, always applies.

(For those of you not as geeky as me, that's "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"... and if you haven't read Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, you really, really should. End plug.)

For years I was baffled as to exactly what the Bush Administration's real goal in Iraq was.  During the run up to invasion, I posted my fervent belief that it was all about the oil, stupid.  (I can't find the original entry, which would have been posted sometime around 2003, but the link takes you to a more recent blog page where I re-posted it.)

Since then, I've realized that I was right, and I was wrong -- it is all about the oil, but it's not about giving the American people access to cheap gas.   An American President who secured such access would see his approval ratings shoot through the roof, of course, and might well go down in history as one of our greatest American Presidents ever. 

On the other hand, keep the Iraqi oil off the market, as Greg Palast so ably documents has been the intention of Big Oil since 1925, and your buddies in Big Oil will doubtless reward you with billions.  Hmmmm... posterity, patriotism, national prosperity, a shining spot in the American history texts... or filthy lucre?  Lots and lots and LOTS of it?

It's obvious which choice our current Commander in Chief has made -- we ain't likely to see the Iraqi war stopped any time soon, and every minute it drags on, oil company profits continue to spiral.  Bush and Cheney may be Americans, but their true patriotic loyalty lies indisputably with Big Petroleum.   Why else do you think Cheney worked so hard to keep all his early energy policy meeting minutes privileged?

But how do you keep the Iraqi oil off the market?  Well, here's the aforementioned Greg Palast's invaluable chart detailing the answer to that query:

A History of Oil in Iraq

Suppressing It, Not Pumping It

• 1925-28 "Mr. 5%" sells his monopoly on Iraq's oil to British Petroleum and Exxon, who sign a "Red-Line Agreement" vowing not to compete by drilling independently in Iraq.
• 1948 Red-Line Agreement ended, replaced by oil combines' "dog in the manger" strategy -- taking control of fields, then capping production--drilling shallow holes where "there was no danger of striking oil."
• 1961 OPEC, founded the year before, places quotas on Iraq's exports equal to Iran's, locking in suppression policy.
• 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Iran destroys Basra fields. Iraq cannot meet OPEC quota. 1991 Desert Storm. Anglo-American bombings cut production.
• 1991-2003 United Nations Oil embargo (zero legal exports) followed by Oil-for-Food Program limiting Iraqi sales to 2 million barrels a day.
• 2003-? "Insurgents" sabotage Iraq's pipelines and infrastructure.
• 2004 Options for Iraqi Oil -- The secret plan adopted by U.S. State Department overturns Pentagon proposal to massively in crease oil production. State Department plan, adopted by government of occupied Iraq, limits state oil company to OPEC quotas.

See, the fervent liberal belief that the Bush Administration is, above all else, incompetent, is just another smoke screen by some of the most cannily able, and morally depraved, political and economic operators in the history of our country.  We haven't 'won' this war because Bush and Cheney have never wanted us to 'win' this war.  Don Rumsfield famously claimed that you 'go to war with the army you have, not the army you want', but in that case, why were brigades of highly trained military policemen who fully expected to be sent to Iraq to deal with post invasion reconstruction never actually deployed?  Weren't they part of the 'army we have'?  But a successful post-invasion stage resulting in a relatively peaceful Iraq with a fully restored industrial infrastructure was never in the cards Bush and Cheney were playing.  Why?  It's simple -- once we 'win' the war and have Iraq under control, the American people are going to expect gas prices to drop. And we can't have that.

So, we never win the war, Iraq remains in chaos, oil prices continue to ratchet upward, and greasy oil barons like Bush and Cheney continue to pocket enormously inflated windfall profits from a largely artificial global petroleum shortage.

That those currently lining their pockets are war profiteers, and that the cash they're happily stuffing their pillows with is all blood money, should go without saying, but let's say it anyway.  Every cent of extra oil profit that an Exxon stockholder has socked away has been bought with the blood, toil, sweat, and tears of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.  Every death, every disfigurement, every act of destruction, every displacement, every maiming, every rape, every act of terrorism or torture that has resulted from this war has been entirely unnecessary -- and insanely profitable, to Bush, Cheney, and the people really pulling their strings.

We The People are not without our share of the blame, either.  Very few of us would ever have protested the War in Iraq had it gone swiftly and smoothly, and resulted in U.S. gas prices plummeting back to mid-90s prices. 

It's important to understand, however, that oil was cheap in the 1990s largely due to British Petroleum's discovery and quick exploitation of the North Sea oilfields.  That discovery brought gas prices to a historic low, when adjusted for inevitable inflation, and they stayed low throughout the 90s, allowing many of us to relax and believe that the 'oil shortage' had been entirely spurious, and we could start driving monster cars, trucks, and SUVs again and keep doing so for the rest of our lives.

But insatiable oil consumption on a global scale depleted the vast mineral wealth of the North Sea oilfields in less than a decade, and it's important to understand that the even vaster resources waiting under the Iraqi sands (should anybody ever actually get to drill and pump them) are just as finite.  Even if the neo-con dream of cheap oil for everyone had been allowed to come true, the result would simply be another 90s cheap energy bubble.  We might see gas drop back to $2 or so per gallon and stay there until maybe 2015 or so... but once we sucked the Iraqi oil fields dry (as we inevitably would) we'd be right back where we are now.

In a way, Bush and Cheney have done the American people a favor, although it's an unintentional one.  By creating an ongoing field of chaos and horror in Iraq, they have guaranteed that we can never establish the kind of pro-American regime there we would need to gain access to the seductive but ultimately treacherous wealth of the Iraq oilfields.  As such, our next President will have only one of two choices -- withdraw, and commit American resources to the development and exploitation of  alternate energy sources... or continue to pour American blood and treasure directly into the pocketbooks of Big Oil.

Hillary Clinton was almost undoubtedly in the pockets of Big Energy, which is most likely why she never could bring herself to recant or apologize for her pro-invasion vote, or fully commit herself to a real, full withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.  John McCain has been frantically signaling throughout his Presidential campaign that he's for sale to not just the highest bidder, but most likely to everyone else involved in the auction who can meet his minimum asking price.  Only Senator Obama doesn't seem to have anything murky in his past that would make me believe he intends to further line the pockets of Big Petroleum with American and Iraqi blood. 

It's way past time Americans started demanding serious commitment of our tax dollars to the development of viable alternative fuels and energy technologies.  It may even be too late.  But for more of the same -- complete dependence on foreign oil that continues to become more and more expensive every day -- certainly, pull that lever for John McCain. 

A few months ago, Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings went all plaintive over those who criticize Barack Obama on the grounds that he's all talk, no action:

"I came to Obama by an unusual route: as I explained here, I follow some issues pretty closely, and over and over again, Barack Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet" -- though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look -- he's over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn't even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation...

...Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard people saying that Obama wasn't "substantive". It was exactly like my experience in 2004 when, after hearing Wes Clark for the first time, I went and looked up his positions on a whole host of issues of concern to me, and only then started reading media accounts of him in which I "learned" that no one knew what his positions were.

As some of my students would say: I was like, wtf?"

I'm a pretty ardent supporter of Senator Obama, something testified to by the sign planted in my front lawn (a sign vastly outnumbered in my neighborhood by the horde of Clinton signs still truculently sprouting from every other lawn). Nonetheless, I ain't blind, I ain't deaf, and I sure ain't dumb. As far as his campaigning style goes, Obama is the Ronald Reagan of the 2008 election season -- he's all about emotionally stirring, even inspiring rhetoric that, unfortunately, seems to have little or no actual semantic value. "Yes we can!" and "Change we can believe in" strike me as little more than liberal/progressive flourishes rung on Reagan's "It's morning in America".

And, okay, I can see that Obama has some substance to him, even given his relatively short career in politics to date. What I can't see, though, is how he's using the enormous media attention generated by his Presidential campaign to address any of the truly urgent, truly global issues confronting every living being currently drawing breath or in some way processing energy on the planet today.

Just one example of this is Obama's energy policy, as explained in this speech he gave in 2006. Obama calls for a much more marked increase in the fuel efficiency of American manufactured motor cars. He wants more hybrids, and he especially wants to see more production of alternative biofuels.

Dewey scholar/ecoblogger "David Roberts" advises that he thinks this is a 'pretty ballsy' speech and rejoices that "That man's got a pair, you gotta give him that" (perhaps underscoring the huge fundamental perceptual disadvantage Hillary Clinton had throughout the primary season, but never mind that for now)... but in point of fact, as an energy policy, this is all worthless feel-good Hollywood happy ending bs.

Like every other ambitious politician out there, Obama is paralyzed by the thought of trying to tell the truth to the American electorate. The simple, brutal, horrible, unacceptable, unavoidable facts of the matter are this: we have to change our way of living, because the cheap energy is running out. America uses up a massively disproportionate amount of the world's available consumables, especially petroleum derivatives and natural gas. And we are going to have to stop.

If we don't, the rest of the world will do its level best to make us, and if it turns out they can't (and global civilization survives that eventual determination), well, eventually (not far in the future, at the rate we suck it down) the oil is all going to run out, anyway.

I can certainly understand why Obama is all style, no substance when it comes to, well, substantial issues. And, certainly, a Reaganite circa 1980, confronted with someone criticizing his or her candidate on the basis of what seemed like a lot of high falutin', pretty soundin', but ultimately empty rhetoric, might well shoot back that Reagan's two terms as governor were full of substantial political accomplishments -- Reagan legalized 'therapeutic abortion' in California (something he claimed forever afterward he regretted), he sent in the Highway Patrol and the National Guard to break up student protests in Berkeley, resulting in one student death and hundreds of injuries, he spoke out strongly in opposition to what he saw as excessive Federal tax rates and social spending, and in favor of capital punishment.

Yet what Reagan did not say when he was running for President in 1979 was, "I'll cut your taxes, eviscerate social spending, and, at the same time, run up historic deficits by increasing America's defense budget 40%." The first two would have sounded very good to both economic and social conservatives; the last one, however, would have probably lost him some votes among everyone but service members, their families, and defense contractors. Had Reagan also admitted that there was a very good chance his economic policies would result in the national unemployment rate rising from an unpleasantly high 7% to a staggering 10.8%, he most likely would have lost the votes of everyone in the country making less than $40,000 per year... and with them, the election.

Similarly, there is a reason Obama does not specifically and substantively address extremely serious problems like the global energy crisis, preferring instead to focus on stirring sounding but still essentially trivial microissues like weapons regulation, government corruption, and the welfare of our military veterans. And there's also a reason why, when he does address energy issues, he does it with half truths and half measures. Just as with Reagan, if Obama were to tell the whole truth about these issues, and what measures will really have to be taken to deal with them, it would cost him votes... in fact, were Obama to ever publicly state "Here's some change you can believe in -- if we want to survive as a species on this globe, Americans are going to have to give up our private automobiles, rebuild and substantially expand our mass transit systems, and stop wasting so much of the world's irreplaceable resources. Which means we have to eat healthier, exercise more, and stop using so much electricity" it would certainly cost him the election.

So I can understand why Obama prefers high flown elocution to talking about the actual nuts and bolts of tough policies that will not be even remotely popular with the American people.

Nonetheless, whether I understand it or not, whether it's justifiable or not, it's still valid to say that Obama avoids talking about substantive policy by substituting stirring rhetoric... and pointing to his past legislative record and saying "Look, look, he really has done stuff" isn't going to change that. Obama has decided to run for President, and more than that, he has pretty clearly decided to do so successfully. He's in it to win it -- and it is an unfortunate peculiarity of democratic politics that when you are running for office, you dare not speak truth to power... at least, not when 'power' is an electorate as monumentally spoiled, self centered, and entitled as ours.

I can only hope that Obama's chosen course of inspiring rhetoric that focuses on generalities and relative mico-issues while ignoring the catastrophically hard truths that wait to confront us all sometime this autumn will work for him, because I think Obama is much better equipped to deal with the coming crises than McCain.

Obama has (I think) both wisdom and integrity, two qualities that American government in general, and the office of the President in particular, has lacked for generations. Even more important, Obama has the most crucial quality of all for a Chief Executive presiding over the kind of global calamities that we will all inevitably have to confront in the very near future -- he has the ability to lead, and to inspire others to follow.

If anyone can get We, The People up off our fat asses and into some kind of meaningful, cooperative social action, well... it won't be McCain, that's for damn sure.

In the meantime, though, if past elections have shown us one thing, it's that all style, no substance is a winning campaign strategy. So keep it up with the sermons, Senator, and avoid telling us any hard truths, like, you know, exactly how fast NASCAR is going the way of the dodo when you get into office.

Although, to be honest, if you actually admitted to that one out loud, you'd make me like you even more than I already do.