George Bush's Blood Lust For $5 Gasoline

Leave it to the deaf, dumb and blind president of the United States to help drive already out-of-control oil prices into the stratosphere by further upsetting the always delicate balance in the Middle East through another round of saber rattling.

It is not unreasonable to conclude at this point that George Bush is so inept that he literally cannot do anything right beyond handing the grieving parents of an Iraq war casualty a medal and folded American flag without dropping them.

The Iraq war has been unique in American history in that the president has worked hard to make it sacrifice free and has largely succeeded. But now we all are feeling the effects of a war without end at the pump and supermarket checkout line even if most of us have not made the connection.

Don't expect John McCain to do the math for us because he's too busy beating the bomb Iran war drum with the president. Besides which, $5 gas and spiking food prices are justified because we're making the Middle East safe for democracy, right?

Analysts described the global oil market as "hysterical" and "shooting itself in the foot" after oil futures jumped a staggering $11 a barrel on Friday to set yet another new record at over $138 a barrel.

This development, combined with still more bleak economic news as the unemployment rate surged to 5.5. percent in May, the biggest increase in more than two decades, further fanned recession fears. Some 330,000 Americans have lost their jobs because of Bush economic policies since the year began, while government unemployment figures do not include the millions of Americas who have run out of benefits and are no longer looking for work.

But while the U.S. may not be technically in recession according to some economic parameters, that is of cold comfort to consumers.

Consider this while you pump $50 worth of gas to fill your thrifty Honda hybrid or $120 to top off your macho-man Chevy pickup truck: Rising inflation continues to eat into your paycheck like the rust around the wheel wells of the car you can't afford to trade in because you're so deeply in hock to mortgage and credit card companies. As it is, wages grew at less than a 1 percent rate on an inflation-adjusted basis in the first quarter of the year.

Iran is the second-largest OPEC oil producer and exports nearly two million barrels of black gold a day in a global market with about three million barrels of spare capacity. So a statement by an Israel deputy prime minister that an attack on Iran's nuculer . . . er, nuclear sites looked "unavoidable" if it did not abandon its problematic nuclear program is all it took for global financial markets to tumble, with the Dow down 394 points, or 3 percent.

And yet again Americans are reminded that the Straits of Hormuz is not a tale about a damsel in distress from the Arabian Nights, but rather a 21-mile-wide passage to the open ocean for 30 percent of the world's oil supply. Iran controls this choke point, although the U.S. has a large naval presence in the area.

It is ironic that one of the few things that the president cannot do is directly influence global oil prices.

But Bush could have done a lot of things that do influence those prices. These include not stubbornly clinging to a bomb-first-talk-later Iran policy, deregulating financial markets to such devastating effect, and merely paying lip service to the reality that the U.S. must sink many billions of dollars into alternative energy resources if it is to begin to wean itself from dependence on the foreign oil that helped make he and his family rich.

That oil includes blood-strained crude from Saudi Arabia, whose rulers are especially close friends of the Bush clan and spawned most of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as Iraqi oil, the underlying reason for a war that is the biggest reason for runaway gasoline prices.

But don't try to tell that to a deaf, dump and blind president.