I know You Love Your SUV or Pick-up, BUT...

People don't like to be embarrassed about their choice of vehicle purchase. We all like to think we're smart consumers -- but not all of us are. Things have changed bigtime, and if there were ever any good reasons to buy a truck for the home (much less for a solo commute), they're quickly evaporating.

Sure, Detroit doesn't offer great replacements yet, but there's no good replacement for gas at all, and it now costs almost as much per gallon as silver costs per half ounce. Let's see, a gallon of gas, a half ounce of pure silver. Hmm. "Fill 'er up, honey! Right after you sell your necklace on eBay! Oh, you sold that last week? ...Uh-oh."

I have no doubt that if you look at sticker prices on used car lots, there are a lot of nervous numbers already. If the bottom hasn't dropped out yet, I think there's no doubt, it will. More and more folks are going to quietly switch to Saturns and Civics, or if they can get one, a hybrid, and suddenly claim to have gone from smart to smarter (rather than from "low performance left-lane-hogging, view-obliterating, rollover-prone gas guzzler" to responsible, if I may say so).

Once the self-esteem adjustment is made, people who thought their truck was a smart buy are going to quietly decide something else is a lot smarter. And they would be right, I think. Hauling all that extra steel around just to get a bigger trunk, when a good sedan holds 5 people and gear for a camping trip for a half-ton less?

Biggest losses on trade-ins will go to the hindmost in this deal. Gas isn't going back down to sane any time soon, unless some bigwig politicians and CEOs have some kind of a road to Damascus experience, and believe it or not, things aren't nearly bad enough for that to happen, yet. .

I'm already starting to miss those little Dodge Colt hatchbacks from Japan in 1971 that got 45 miles to the gallon and yet performed like little muscle cars -- and they didn't cost much either, if you factor out dealer gouging.

It's not about the SUV or pick-up, ladies and gentlemen -- it's about the gas.

Selfish Minority Interferes with NOLA Effort

Yes, folks, sad as the trait may be in the human species, there are always some thugs who are willing to use a human tragedy to rationalize extreme selfishness.

In this case, it's the Democrats.

After waiting an indecent interval, on day four of the tragedy the liberals have done just what they planned to do since Katrina reached category 5 status in the gulf and took aim at Biloxi -- blame it all on Bush, and, believe it or not, the war in Iraq -- for pure, fictional, partisan political purposes.

Yes, the Democrats, faced with the largest domestic natural disaster in modern times -- decided to make some hay for 2008.

So, it's all the war in Iraq's fault, folks. You thought it was the size of the relief effort, or the snipers shooting at copters and medics, but no. It's that war the liberals have never been able to make its peace with, that war the American people have already been heard on, that war that liberals living in the past still believe they can cancel, erase, and undo. That war the Democrats lost over in 2004.

For them, it couldn't be that this is the first disaster of its kind in modern history, and that the state and local officials didn't immediately take control of the massive federal resources President Bush delivered to the perimeter of the disaster area.

For liberals, it must be about Bush and the war in Iraq. It must be that Bush isn't the man Gore was. It must be that if only THEY were in charge, life would be better, Islamists would love us, gas would be cheap, looters wouldn't loot, levees would hold, toilets would flush, and evacuees would be singing Kum-ba-yah before campfires in the Superdome while young American troops, fresh back from Iraq, hold their s'mores over the embers.

It must be that they're irretrievably nuts.
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