George Will On...

Ah, everything.

"The president's headline-grabbing assertion that America is "addicted" to oil is wonderfully useless. If it means only — and what else can it mean? — that for the foreseeable future we will urgently need a lot of oil, it is banal. The amusingly discordant word "addicted" couched censoriousness — the president as national scold: Our consumption of oil is somehow irresponsible — in the vocabulary of addiction, which is the therapeutic language of Oprah Nation, where no one is responsible for anything bad because bad behavior is medicalized.
Not to worry. Bush says that by 2025 America will "replace" — a certain ambiguity there — "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East." Replace with what? Other oil? Never mind. Such recurring goals, located safely over the horizon resemble Soviet agricultural quotas, except that no one will be shot when they're not met."

Back when Ronald Reagan was offering his brand of chicken-in-every-potness, Mr. Will was seated firmly in, if not the driver of, the bandwagon. Ronnie could sell ice to the Eskimo's and the pitch was the thing. Now we have George, and his public speaking skills pale in comparison so his ideas must as well. The irrefutable fact of the matter remains that our gluttony for oil is irresponsible but there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. And since elected officials are elected to do something they must at least appear to be contemplating such serious matters. Anyone who was around during the energy shortages of the early 70's can remember the same rhetoric, and the deja vu that accompany's todays efforts to calm the huddled masses can be quite disconcerting.

We don't do ANYTHING until it becomes an emergency because at any given time there's simply too much to do and doom and gloom become the priorities. Were Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan to be resurrected this instant and each given a particular problem to work upon, there might, just might be a way out. We do not have civil servants making decisions with the best interests of the country in mind, we have partisan hacks making decisions with their best interests in mind, so at every level of government the buck is passed until it eventually reaches the President's desk. For decades, New Orleans took the money and ran and when push came to shove who was blamed? For decades, the American public purchased oversized fuel-guzzlers and somehow this is to be blamed on whatever sitting President has to address the problem of overpriced oil or empty gas station pumps.

Growth, growth, and more growth. Everything has to grow or it's somebody's fault. But now we find ourselves in a time when growth has hit a technological wall. We all live longer because medical science has convinced us to wash our hands and the older we get the less productive we become and the higher maintenance we get. Gone are the days when nature would step in and scour the planet of the weakest members of humanity, and even wars cannot depopulate like they once could. Thank heavens for the liberals. Just imagine 25 or 30 million more people seeking the same piece of the pie were it not for abortion.

What's that? How many geniuses were flushed down industrial-strength garbage disposal units at abortion factories? Beats me. Maybe there was an Einstein or two but we'll really never know. Will we.