I’ll confess that I’ve grown rapidly tired of the hubbub around gas prices. It’s pretty clear that our national leaders don’t plan to do anything but posture and pander, and saying, "look how the jerks are posturing and pandering!" gets tiresome after a while.
However, the intrepid bloggers at Think Progress never tire of it, so I’m just going to outsource to them for a while.
For instance, see this post, with video of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist — who has rapidly become one of the most pathetic, sad-sack public figures in memory, still scrabbling desperately to keep his presidential hopes alive, the last one to know that they were stillborn from the start — making the comically preposterous claim that gas prices wouldn’t be high now if Clinton had allowed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ten years ago. Seriously.
And then there’s this post, which relays the amusing story of Karl Rove a) for once getting something right, and b) getting blasted by his own people for it.
It’s not every day that Karl Rove gets a lesson in politics. But the President’s ace strategist was brought up sharply at a recent White House meeting with a group of Republican congressional-staff chiefs when he suggested that the best approach to soaring gasoline prices was this: wait. There’s no immediate fix available, so let the market work its magic, Rove said.
Yeah, Republicans in Congress didn’t like hearing that. "We want better panders, Karl! That’s why we pay you the big bucks!"
