The "Addicted To Oil" Meme

Perusing the newsprint masteheads yesterday morning it was pretty obvious what the takeaway was from the SOTU Address. I ignored the thing but my feelings are pretty much summed up by a commenter on Andrew Sullivan's blog

"Bush's Addiction Meme precisely encapsulates everything that is wrong with contemporary Republican moralizing. Bush wants to cast the essentially pragmatic problem of our dependence on middle-eastern oil as a moral issue, as if we're a bunch of crazed junkies. There's something to be said for this view, but you can't say it without taking the next step: a junky needs to be told to kick the habit.

Recovery takes guts, and hard work, and sacrifice. Is that what Bush is asking of the country? Not at all. Should we increase gas taxes, improve fuel efficiency, push for smaller cars? No way. Who then is going to solve our addiction problem? In a word: Big Government. We need a new drug, and Big Gov's going to invent it, and it'll be cheaper, all the high without the hangover. That's the miracle of government: it keeps you from having to be self-governing. This is such a neat inversion of everything conservatism is supposed to stand for you'd think the progressives must have invented it, but you'd be wrong."

Egg-zactly. Even when Bush is right (Addicted to Oil), he's wrong (not proposing to actually DO anything about it). The Chief Executive could, for example say, I'm going to ditch the 747 Air Force One for one of these slick, new 787's as soon as they are available and save the taxpayers gobs of money in maintenance and fuel over the next decades, and begin to set the stage for the kinds of personal sacrifices we'll all have to make to "kick the oil habit."

But it was never about that. Any challenge to the nation's collective dependence on the car culture and all that it entails was never even on the radar screen. Kicking isn't on the agenda here. It's like getting a junkie to switch from street smack to government methadone. At the end of the day, he's still a junkie.