Glenn Beck, Arsehole

Beck attempts to ridicule Obama's recent comments that keeping one's tires properly inflated would save drivers more money on gas than drilling offshore further reinforce was a complete moron he is. He addresses an article by Michael Grunwald called "The Tire Gauge Solution: No Joke." Just get a load of this:

Welcome back to Fantasy Land. Saying "we ought to" is exactly the same as "but if everyone" -- a way to make a ridiculous point sound plausible. It's like saying: We ought to all live in peace and harmony. It's not that easy.

Damn right, Mr. Beck, it's not easy, especially with blowhards like you cynically wasting time trying to prove how clever you are. But, you see, it really is true. Keeping one's tires properly inflated really does increase mileage by 3%, thereby reducing (immediately) one's gas consumption. If one's car gets 25 mpg on under-inflated tires, it would get 26 mpg with properly inflated tires. For an average driver doing 1,000 miles a month, that's a savings of 19 gallons (in California, that's about $80) of gas per year. Translating that into 200 million drivers means 3.8 billion gallons of gas (which requires about 181 million barrels of oil) saved with a tire gauge and discipline.

Ah, discipline, that's the magic word here, isn't it? What Obama proposes requires actual effort on the part of Americans to exercise a little consistency, a little commitment, a little discipline. We lazy, fat Americans inflicted with a perpetual sense of entitlement, would have to get our hands a little dirty and do four prolonged deep knee bends while inflating our tires each week. Better still, we could get our kid to do it while we listened to Rush Limbaugh in the car!

Beck, you really reveal your idiocy with statements like this:

But let's follow his yellow brick road for a second anyway. If we all put on our Jimmy Carter sweaters and used less oil, we'd still need millions of barrels. How about making sure those barrels come from America by starting to drill for it now? We'll never be truly free until we're completely free from Middle Eastern oil.

You just don't get it, do you? While the last sentence is spot-on, the solution is not drilling. We will produce only about 1% of the planet's oil, but we consume far more than that. Drilling will not create freedom, it will prolong our dependence on the Arabs and Muslims who have us by the short hairs. It will take more than 10 years to extract enough oil from the ground that would even begin to reduce prices by a few pennies per gallon; meanwhile we're still tethered to the Saudi teat and belching more and more filth into our skies. In the short term, having more oil to refine would be a good thing, but we've seen all too clearly how short-term thinking works out for us: Mired in a bloody, endless state of War in Iraq. Tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans that have largely contributed to record-high budget deficits. A debt ceiling that exceeds $10 TRILLION. Housing and credit crises that have killed jobs and ruined the financial futures of millions of Americans. Unchecked and unregulated carbon emissions that have ravaged our air and threaten to irreparably damage the planet. Should I go on?

Beck tries to paint Obama as a hypocrite for using the tire gauge idea (which Beck calls a gimmick) while dismissing McSame's gas-tax holiday idea as a gimmick. But again, McSame's is a short-term, politically-motivated way to buy votes, while Obama's is a long-term way to reduce one's consumption and make the country a cleaner, better place.

While saving 181 million barrels of oil is only about 20 days' consumption in this country, not doing our best to conserve will do far more damage the than extra effort it will take to conserve. Add to the oil savings efforts like that of T. Boone Pickens to harness more wind power and the use of so-called "urban turbines" in major cities to harness the wind that blows up the sides of tall buildings, plus efforts to use more compact fluorescent bulbs, will make a difference.

The time to change the way we think has come. What Beck and others like him fail (utterly and miserably) to grasp is that exploiting Americans' apathy about (almost) everything is a recipe for our national decline. Folks like to blame the other guy (the abortionists, the religious wing-nuts, the Executive Branch, the Congress, the customer service guy who won't let you talk to a manager), but in reality we are to blame. All of us. We care too little about others, and too much about ourselves. Maybe a little more practicality, a little more effort, and a little less miscreant grumbling will get us and our children somewhere better.