Articles by David Roberts

Gas price follies

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!"

Skepticism

This great post on Sprol brings some much-needed skepticism to many of the energy alternatives currently being touted as green -- ethanol and "clean coal" among them.

Beez!

Did you know that a swarm of bees is also known as a grist of bees?

I leave it to readers to tease out the metaphorical implications.

America’s place in the world

George W. Bush has presided over the diminution of America's prestige and influence in ways almost too numerous to count: flouting the Geneva Conventions, permitting torture, launching unprovoked wars, claiming unprecedented executive power, bungling relationships with the UN and virtually every other country on the planet, eroding civil liberties, increasing government secrecy, the list goes on and on.

But in the long haul, I think his most grievous blow to this country is the one that is least discussed and understood: his utter failure to prepare the U.S. for the 21st century energy situation. This is treated with typical casual silliness in the press and has provoked little outrage in a public that sees American global hegemony as a fixed fact of life.

But it isn't fixed. It isn't immutable. Matter of fact, it's tottering: