"Inflate Your Tires. Victory or death!"

Heh. Charles Krauthammer with a penetrating look at how the Democrats are trying to lose in the Fall:

Barack Obama remains opposed to new offshore drilling (although he now says he would accept a highly restricted version as part of a comprehensive package). Just last week, he claimed that if only Americans would inflate their tires properly and get regular tune-ups, "we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling."
This is bizarre. By any reasonable calculation of annual tire-inflation and tune-up savings, the Outer Continental Shelf holds nearly a hundred times as much oil. As for oil shale, also under federal moratorium, after a thousand years of driving with Obama-inflated tires and Obama-tuned engines, we would still have saved only one-fifth the oil shale available in the United States.

Then he pops the very salient question:

But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who's against properly inflated tires? Let's start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. ("Inflate your tires. Victory or death!") Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.

Do Both? D'oh! Why didn't the Obamessiah think of that? Then, I think Charles gets a little carried away in his enthusiasm, but I get his point:

Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs).

Heh.

The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that's been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.

And now, for the coup de grâce :

...drilling requires no government program, no newly created bureaucracy, no pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one has yet invented. It requires only one thing, only one act. Lift the moratorium. Private industry will do the rest. And far from draining the treasury, it will replenish it with direct taxes, and with the indirect taxes from the thousands of non-subsidized new jobs created.

No future "someday" technologies. No dependency on foreign sun* or fickle wind. Do it all. Let the consumer sort out which he prefers, but don't hamstring the economy in the process!
But doing it all means: Congress has to lift its artificial moratorium and let the American economy do what it does best! What about it Nancy? Don't you think that it even deserves an up or down vote? (And why does the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars always play in my head when I think of Ms. Pelosi?)

*Editor's Note: We currently import 100% of our solar energy from outside the United States. I think Congress should look into this...when they finally get their butts back from vacation!

Cross Posted at Say Anything