Accidental Blogger

It will probably damage my credibility with some folks to start my guest blogging by admitting that, after five years of dishonesty, hypocrisy, and incompetence, Bush is still able to provoke not only my disgust, but my disappointment. The president’s tone, with it’s unique combination of put-upon entitlement and Texas frat-boy banter, drives me up the wall, so I haven’t actually watched a state of the union address since 2000. But the Fourth Estate faked me out last night, with a slew of wire reports that pulled his speciously intriguing U.S. Addicted to Oil line out of its context of tired solutions and empty promises.  Clean coal? It doesn’t require an expertise in environmental studies to understand that a suggested move from one, non-renewable resource to another is non-responsive to the problem of "addiction." Imagine if Bush’s speech writers had left out the word, clean, and claimed an exciting new solution to oil dependence: coal! Nineteenth-century politicians, in their graves, would have scratched their heads in confusion as to why this was news. (Bush, of course, doesn’t have to worry about whether clean coal is actually clean, since as Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes’s recent pro-Bush biography notes, a private meeting with science fiction novelist Michael Crichton reaffirmed Bush’s belief that global warming does not exist).    Supporting technological innovation, on the other hand, sounds grand, just as it did in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

The real eye-roller, for me, however, was the promotion of ethanol. A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to watch a couple of DC lobbyists show what they could do for clients by presenting the demonstration they had put together for an ethanol interest group. I’ll never forget one, a friend of a prominent Midwestern Democratic Congressman, who looked near tears as he said, "What could be more American than corn?" The idea of drawing energy from the fields brings joy to many subsidy supported corn and soy farmers (a significant number of whom profess to hate Welfare and other "government hand-outs").  Too bad Ethanol’s status as an energy-saving, renewable resource is bunk. Simply put, ethanol takes more energy to produce than it provides. Having read a number of articles (which I’m too lazy to look up right now) connecting obesity and diabetes to the increasing use of price-supported corn syrup in everyday food items, I looked to see whether I was alone in my corn-hating conspiracy theories (they’ll love this post in Iowa), and found this great rant on the Daily Kos. Numerous other articles also detail the link provided by agricultural subsidies between the disparate problems of obesity and the irrational promotion of ethanol.

Now, In my most silver lining thinking, I would have said that the upside to Bush’s professed belief in market-based solutions would be the potential rejection of a solution that is not only non-responsive to the problem (which never stopped him before), but anti-competitive. It would be disingenuous of me, however, to claim surprise at Bush’s jumping on the ethanol band wagon after his hypocritical support of steel tariffs, etc. What could be more American than corn, indeed. Sooooweeee little piggies!