Striking Oil
Burt Prelutsky
Monday, June 09, 2008

Sometimes, I swear, when I see what our tax dollars get us in Congress,
I feel like asking for my money back. But, other times, I find myself
thinking that the laughs those clowns provide us nearly, but not quite,
make up for their incompetence, hypocrisy and mendacity. The Marx
Brothers, at their goofiest, couldn’t hold a candle to these
self-important bumblers, although I’m sure that Groucho would have been
sorely tempted to try.

You see nincompoops like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and John
Murtha, bloviating on TV and you realize that when poll after poll
indicates that these political hacks have an approval rate only half as
high as George Bush’s and only a point or two higher than measles, they
somehow assume we don’t have them in mind.

Because of their arrogance and pomposity, they can’t help
being amusing, but they are never more hysterical than when they hold
hearings and sit in moral judgment of those they regard as lesser
beings. Which, when you get right down to it, includes virtually
everyone who pays their salaries.

A couple of years ago, we got to watch them chastise baseball
players who’d been accused of using steroids and human growth hormones.
As a lifelong baseball fan, I resented these guys for breaking
long-standing records they never would have approached if they hadn’t
cheated. But I got no satisfaction from watching a bunch of puffed-up
mediocrities, who prostrate themselves to lobbyists on a daily basis,
lording it over a bunch of athletes who, steroids or no steroids, had
spent 15 or 20 years standing in a batter’s box just twenty yards away
from iron-armed freaks hurling baseballs 98 mph in their direction.
What’s more, I knew darn well that after performing for the TV cameras,
these same politicians were lining up to get autographs for their
grandkids.

More recently, I got my year’s quota of laughs when Congress
decided to grill oil company executives because, I guess, the price of
gas was higher than it had been in 1958.

There’s nothing that rich, pampered politicians like better
than putting rich, pampered business executives on the hot seat…at
least until they have to go, hat in hand, to grovel for campaign
contributions.

I actually found myself sympathizing with the executives
because they pretty much had to sit there and take it. God forbid they
opened their yaps and pointed out that we’d not only have cheaper gas,
but not have to toady to the Arabs, the Russians and Hugo Chavez, if
these same politicians would quit caving in to the environmental
fascists and allowed American oil companies to drill in Anwar, in the
Dakotas and in the deep blue sea. It would also be a good idea if we
finally began using nuclear power in a big way. Heck, if France can do
it without turning Paris into Chernobyl, it can’t be that hard.

In the meantime, thanks to these buffoons, I’m stuck paying
$4.15-a-gallon for regular. Which is bad enough. But what makes
watching these windbags flap their gums even more disconcerting is the
realization that Washington could easily supply us with energy for the
foreseeable future, if only someone could figure out how to replace
fossil fuels with hot air and snake oil.

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