perfidy

Based on the latest antics of "Denny Pelosi", one could reasonably get the impression our elected leaders are either gutless or elitist.

Sometimes, reality sucks. Current gas prices are a great example of that.

The French way, it would seem, is to propose a half-solution to the problem (better than none, mind you), and then to climb down from it after street protests by the disaffected presumed-losers from the policy. Examples abound, but the recent tail-between-the-legs by "Black Jack" Chirac on the utterly reasonable attempts by Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin to grease the market for youth employment in France is perhaps most instructive.

That was a case either of the government being too weak-kneed to tell the people what they needed to hear or being certain the people were too stupid, greedy, or both to understand the need for change. Result? Cram-down policies, rejected by the people because they weren't explained fully and correctly.

Same deal today in the US, it seems - the scary correlation between Bush's approval rating and gas prices has awakened the sleeping and impotent populist in each of our Republican leaders. Morons. It's bad enough when the Democrats do it, but flatly embarrassing when the GOP does.

I'm sure that sometimes it's better to be seen to be doing something rather than not, but this isn't one of those times, and will simply feed and nurture the economic illiteracy of those who don't know better. How many times will we go through this charade of pretending that if prices go up, someone's slipping us the high hard one? When prices go down, these same folks, illiterates and impotent populists both, seem not to think it odd at all.