Free Republic

I think in the space of about the last 24 hours, Joe Biden claimed that the AIG bailout was bad, but then said it wasn't bad; that we did not need to burn coal; that his apology about the dirty McCain ad was, as they say, inoperative; that FDR once went on television to address the nation after the stock market crash of '29 (that's a twofer that trumps Obama's Americans liberating Auschwitz); and all but said that McCain took a $50,000 bribe. Not a bad day's work — encompassing terrible energy policy, flip-flopping, historical ignorance, and slander. And...

                                             Despite his noisy multilateral rhetoric, a President Obama’s foreign policy is likely to dash hopes for change.On the international scene, Barack Obama is five years out of date.Much of what Barack Obama has said about the world beyond our shores is about five years out of date. Its pedigree is the stale campaign rhetoric of years past. But the world of 2009 will be far different from 2003. And if elected, a President Obama would probably not do much differently abroad than what we are doing right now.Take Afghanistan. It is not the proverbial “good” war — as if...

You are a damn elite, not me! That sums up the current political debate—whether we look at charges that John McCain has so many houses he can’t remember any longer the actual number of them; or that poor Barack Obama is depressed at the soaring price of arugula; or that Fightin’ Joe Biden once bootstrapped himself up at ten in Scranton; or that moose-hunting Sarah snowmachines as naturally as Barack Obama trips over himself in a bowling lane.A nation of wood-cuttersIn short, we remain log-cabin America, formed as the frontier antithesis of Europe. Apparently, we are determined, at least in...

The sudden change in the polls the last 10 days, even though it may be temporary, has prompted a furor in the media that has no parallel in modern election history. Vicious words like "treason", "abasement", "liar", and "lying" are in the air now in an unheralded attack on McCain, often in association with the sex education ad, and the lipstick identification with Palin as a pig. (cf. e.g., Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today). But as Byron York has shown, that ad alleging that Obama supported detailed information about matters of sex to be disseminated to younger children (for...

....Obama once ran successfully as a novel outside critic of Washington. He posed as a politically correct critic of discrimination of all sorts. As an idealist tired of the old Washington doublespeak, Obama mesmerized thousands with sermons against incumbent dinosaurs.Obama's own sense of sainthood was only strengthened when he wowed swarms in front of European monuments, and stepped out on a Democratic National Convention stage replete with Greek columns.But the loftier the moral expectations Obama created, the more the disappointment grew when they couldn't possibly be met. .....Obama's change was aimed against long tenure in Washington - or so he...

A Fair and Balanced ParadoxThe contention is not that the media shouldn’t investigate Palin, but whether they are doing it in the manner, spirit, and level of intensity that they likewise explore Biden (and Obama).So far that is simply not the case. And the voters know that. And it is hurting Obama’s efforts as the polls show. A weird paradox arises: the more the elite media wish to aid Obama, the more their bias and invective seem  to turn off voters and help McCain—and the more they in turn redouble their anger, as if  more smears and furor, not fewer,...

Obama Needs to Get Back to the Teleprompter and the Economy Campaigns are cyclical. They ebb and flow. McCain no doubt will have a bad week characterized by Biden-like gaffes and getting off message. We all remember McCain’s ugly green backdrop behind his acceptance speech, and “my friends” ad nauseam. Still, if some lament the lack of discussion of issues (I do), we nevertheless know if McCain had picked a wonkish “old white” guy like Romney, we still would not be talking about taxes, defense, Iraq and housing; but would be bombarded by the prefab attack ads that would have...

Seven years ago we suffered the worst attack on the American homeland in our history. The material damage proved far greater than the 1814 British burning of Washington, the human losses more grievous than the almost 2,400 Americans lost at Pearl Harbor. Years later, we tend to forget all the dimensions of that sinister homicidal bombing of our institutions. Radical Islam brazenly signaled that it need not have missiles or sophisticated bombers to burn 16 acres in the heart of Manhattan and set the Pentagon afire. Instead, it could turn from the inside out our own technology against us, in...

** EXCERPT ** >>snip<< First, there is a particular class and professional bent to the practitioners of feminism. Sarah Palin has as many kids as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, she has as much of a prior political record as the once-heralded Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, who was named to the Democratic ticket by Walter Mondale in 1984 — and arguably has as much or more executive experience than Barack Obama. Somehow all that got lost in the endless sneering stories about her blue-collar conservatism, small Alaskan town, five children, snowmobiling husband and Idaho college degree. Second, feminism now often equates to...

There is something ignoble about these elite, affluent, and well-connected observers in smug fashion savaging Palin, when — especially in the case of the sneering power-women — we should all at least grant that Palin is intrinsically bright, energetic, savvy, and independent to have come this far at all, given the slanted and insider rules of the game she’s in. So pause to consider: If we wished to ensure that a bright, ambitious, and capable woman would not make it in contemporary national politics, as practiced by most successful contemporary office-holders and adjudicated by the New York-Washington media, then we...

PalinomaniaIf the post-Speech reaction of the talking heads at CNN, PBS and MSBNC, or the op-ed ravings of Gloria Steinem, Maureen Dowd, Eleanor Clift or Sally Quinn are any indication, the Secret Service better enlist the Alaskan National Guard for help ensuring the Alaskan Governor’s safety.A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.When Palin talks about her present life it sounds as authentic as Biden’s showy populism came off as false. Enraged feminists are...

The 2008 presidential campaign is supposed to be a referendum on “change” — who brings it and who doesn’t. Real change, however, hasn’t yet proven to mean new politics. The “hope and change” Barack Obama sounds like a traditional Northern liberal who always wants to raise taxes on the upper classes and businesses, expand government services, and provide more state assistance to the middle class and poor. “Maverick” John McCain talks like a conventional Western or Southern conservative in favor of spending cuts, across-the-board lower taxes, and smaller government. This year the media seem to think change means race and...

It's certainly true that either the next president or next vice president will not be a white male. But does that mean de facto that the country will be run any differently? There is, however, one area where we might have seen real change. The Democrats could have not nominated another lawyer. This may partly explain why former military officer John McCain and working-mom Sarah Palin are polling near even with Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, in a year that otherwise favors the Democrats. A snowmobiling, fishing and hunting mom of five who was trained as a journalist...

Much has been written why Palin both brings strength to the McCain ticket and is a gamble at the same time. Why then the growing wave of popular sentiment in her favor? Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama's America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright's Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry's United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials. So...

2 articles:   Why Do We Like Palin? at the corner (NRO) and Palin: too much Hope and Change? from pajamasmedia Why Do We Like Palin?Much has been written why Palin both brings strength to the McCain ticket and is a gamble at the same time. Why then the growing wave of popular sentiment in her favor? Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama's America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright's Trinity Church, is...

Suddenly there are no longer any more litmus tests — remember the Democratic primary bickering in autumn 2007? — over who was, and was not, always against the war in Iraq. There are no more hearings in which a Sen. Obama or Clinton seek to outdo each other in grandstanding condemnations of the war effort. We see no more discounted “General Betray-Us” ads in the New York Times. The protestors on our street corners have taken down the “No blood for oil!” signs and replaced them with “Hands off Iran!” placards. A Sen. Durbin or Rep. Murtha is quiet about...

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch — all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing. "Citizens of the world" were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new "Planet Earth," which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism. But was that ever quite true? In reality, to...

Why and how did McCain catch up? The greatest consideration is Obama’s Hellenic hubris, which is different than simple arrogance. Hubris is a sort of fit, a haughtiness steeped in delusions of grandeur and divinity that takes over a weak individual, and soon encourages recklessness and overreaching (atê), all culminating in ruin and divine retribution (nemesis). So he transfers his speech to an outdoor forum, where tens of thousands of raving fans can watch him apotheosize in front of a faux Doric temple and accept nomination...

RUSSIA invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at unimaginable levels. Gulf monar chies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch - all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing. "Citizens of the world" were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new "Planet Earth," which was to have followed from a system of free trade, electronic communications, diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism. But was that ever quite true? In reality, to the extent globalism...

August 21, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Blame Everyone Except Russia!The West seems unable to speak with one voice against Russian aggression. By Victor Davis Hanson Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia. Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but assumed no one in the West did. And he was right. Our pundits and politicians are all over the map...

August 28, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Farewell, NATOAmerica's Cold War alliance with Europe has ceased to be a fruitful one. By Victor Davis Hanson When I was growing up in the 1960s, we had a majestic Santa Rosa plum orchard on my family’s farm. The trees were 40 years old and had grown to over 20 feet high. My grandfather would proudly recall how its once-bumper crops of big, sweet plums had helped him survive the Depression and a postwar fall in agricultural prices. But by the 1960s, the towering, verdant trees were more a park than a profitable orchard....

Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia. Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but assumed no one in the West did. And he was right. Our pundits and politicians are all over the map as Putin is variously portrayed as villain, victim, patriot, tyrant -- and more still. The neoconservatives: We must make Russia pay a terrible price for...

<excerpted>Going through letters and email of the last two weeks, and getting very tired of the supposedly outraged who write in to cry “racist” anytime one worries about the neo-socialist agenda of Barack Obama or his utter lack of experience. We are witnessing a sort of national liberal outrage that, in a year when everything favored the Democrats, Obama is still running near even with McCain—something that therefore must be explained as attributable not to his inexperience, gaffes, inability to speak extemporaneously, and messianic self-image, but instead to American racism.Consider: Obama on several occasions evokes his race in a...

Moscow’s Sinister Brilliance   By Victor Davis HansonVictorHanson.com | Thursday, August 14, 2008 Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia. The Home Front The long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a...

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch -- all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing. "Citizens of the world" were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new "Planet Earth," which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism. But was that ever quite true? In reality, to...

Maureen Dowd recently preened that Obama "didn’t even tell Harvard Law School that he was black on his application." To the extent that her own research led her to believe this, or she would know accurately, one should still wonder why in the world Barack Obama, the child of a white woman and African father, would check the affirmative action box? When he applied to law school, there was nothing in the circumstances of his birth or even his upbringing up to then that located him in the African-American experience. Obama's recent evocation of some sort of reparations, the resurgence...

Hard power trumps soft power — but power power trumps both Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia. The Home FrontThe long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a sort of humanitarian intervention...

Hillary's Growing Shadow By Victor Davis Hanson Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck. Impossible? It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal. Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and...

Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck. Impossible? It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal. Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and too liberal. So, everyone is puzzled why...

THE latest round of global agricultural trade negotiations that began seven years ago in Doha, Qatar, collapsed in acrimony this week in Geneva. While India and China are getting the blame for refusing to reduce import tariffs and farm subsidies, you can assume that trade officials in Europe and the United States are breathing a sigh of relief that they aren’t going to have to limit their own protectionism... --snip-- First, they are transparent election-cycle harvests for farm-state politicians, who have small constituencies but exercise outsized national political clout. Second, because such special-interest legislation wins little broad public support, its...

If the press insists on hinging on every word of Obama, can't they at least ask for clarifications and details about his sweeping proclamations? Most are still waiting for the particulars of his idea to create a shadow Pentagon of civilian aid and civil support workers funded to the same tune of $500 billion a year. That seems a big deal that the electorate should ponder? How would it function? Where would the funding come from? What would be the relationship with the Pentagon? And now what does the following mean from Obama: I personally would want to see our...

There is a growing confidence among officers, diplomats and politicians that a constitutional Iraq is going to make it. We don't hear much anymore of trisecting the country, much less pulling all American troops out in defeat. Critics of the war now argue that a victory in Iraq was not worth the costs, not that victory was always impossible. The worst terrorist leaders, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Muqtada al-Sadr, are either dead or in hiding. The 2007 surge, the Anbar Awakening of tribal sheiks against al-Qaida, the change to counterinsurgency tactics, the vast increase in the size and competence...

Why Do Europeans Love Obama? Let us count the ways:1) Obama’s tax code, support of big government programs and redistribution of income, and subservience to UN directives delight the European masses—especially at a time when their own governments are trying to cut taxes, government, seek closer relations with the US, and ask a petulant, pampered public to grow up.2) He offers Euros a sort of cheap assuagement of guilt—in classic liberal style. When Obama says falsely that he does not look like other Americans who have addressed Germans (cf. Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice who have represented US foreign policy...

Two articles in one post discussing the Berlin speech. ‘This Is the Moment’  And now we are loved again? It’s America, ObamaA modest dissent to the citizen of the world July 24, 2008Given the size of the audience in Berlin Thursday, the enthusiastic response, and the standard lines about how we-were-, -are-, and -will-be-friends boilerplate, one wonders whether all it took to win the Euro-hearts and minds was to have a charismatic, multiracial American spice up a standard George W. Bush speech about helping the world, addressing AIDs, more troops in Afghanistan, etc.? So supposedly sophisticated Europeans, who constantly dissect...

The Sixties Won’t Go Away What more can anyone say about the 1960s and all its legacies? By Victor Davis Hanson Those who protested some 40 years ago often still congratulate themselves that their loud zeal alone brought needed “change” to America in civil rights, the environment, women’s liberation, and world peace. Maybe. But critics counter that the larger culture that followed was the most self-absorbed in memory. Everyone can at least agree that the spirit of the “Me Generation” is not going quietly into the night — especially since that generation ushered in a certain coarseness and self-righteousness that...

Hillary used to go ballistic in frustration at the latest rather shameless incarnation of Obama, and McCain should not fall into the same malady. He understandably is angry because Obama, whose opposition to the surge and erstwhile desire to be done with Iraq by March 2007 would have lost the war, rode the anti-war wave when it was popular, and now, in his current metamorphosis to centrist, has piggy-backed onto the good news in Iraq as if it had nothing to do with the surge — as if McCain's lonely support for it either never happened or was irrelevant. And...

[note: You won't read this in five minutes] Nile Gardiner, Ph.D.: Good morning. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and the fifth Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture.The Margaret Thatcher Lecture series began in Sep­tember 2006, with a major speech by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky on the subject, "Is Free­dom for Everyone?" It was followed by lectures on economic freedom and religious freedom by Hernan­do de Soto and Michael Novak, and by Ambassador John Bolton's lecture "Does the United Nations Advance the Cause of Freedom?"Our distinguished speaker today is Victor Davis Han­son, who will address the theme, "In Defense of Liberty: The...

“This is our ethanol”So an exasperated Sen. Barbara Boxer screams that the farm-belt senators better support her regional selfishness in opposing California off-shore drilling against the national interest, in the same manner she went along with the ethanol boondoggle. Odd that she was so brazen in her confessional.Jackson’s N-wordI give some credit to Barack Obama. His ‘hope and change’ mantra drives some to near madness and has proved a wrecking ball of liberal careers. First, in 90 days he destroyed the Clinton political machine, leaving Bill’s past 7-year effort at PC rehabilitation, after Monica and the pardons, in shambles. Now...

In the last 20 years, we were lectured constantly about “post-industrial” America. Experts proclaimed that the United States had evolved into an “information society” of “high-tech jobs.” The traditional sources of American strength—manufacturing, the production of food and fuel, and the assembling of cars and trucks—were apparently passé. Instead, others less fortunate abroad were to do those more grubby tasks, while Americans, with their BlackBerrys and laptops, funded, organized, lectured and critiqued them. Illegal aliens might cook our meals or change our children’s diapers to free us up for far more important tasks of litigation, finance and environmental review. The...

There is by now only one constant in the entire sad Iraqi saga since the brilliant three-week victory of 2003, and the subsequent violent reconstruction that followed. In our collective exasperation almost all the bad news from the front is due to someone else’s stupidity; any good reports are always the result of one’s own insight and sobriety. The result is irony, but also amnesia about what was written and said in the recent past. Consider the paradoxes we’ve witnessed. We were paralyzed for a year over Ambassador Joe Wilson’s carnival-like mission, in part due to the prompt of his...

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama’s flip-flops, as the Senate’s most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Pfleger. But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts. Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court’s overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns. The senator,...

A review of Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others by David Day. Oxford University Press, 2008. < ... excerpted ... > While Mr. Day writes well, draws on a great deal of learning, and offers some interesting examples from the Japanese and Chinese colonial experiences, there nevertheless emerges a predictable, and ultimately tiring, repetition of case studies — centered inordinately on the British colonization of Australia, the European conquest of the Americas, Hitler's efforts to incorporate the East, and what he describes as the contemporary expansion of Israel onto Arab lands. The result is that Mr. Day's selections are not...

General Betray Us?Obama said not a word last autumn about the Moveon.org slander of Gen. Petraeus when he was running hard left of Clinton and the Moveon.org crowd was essential to his candidacy. But now? After West Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, etc. he realizes two things: there are no longer any rivals to the left, but quite a lot to the right who are turned off by him. So Moveon.org goes the way of Rev. Wright, while his grandmother, the flag lapel, guns, death penalty, Iraq, FISA, and NAFTA climb back on the bus—until he is elected (when...

On this Fourth of July of our discontent — with spiraling fuel prices, a sluggish economy, a weak dollar, mounting foreign and domestic debt, continuing costs in Iraq, a falling stock market, and a mortgage crisis — we should remember two truths about America. First, the United States remains the most free and affluent country in the history of civilization. Second, almost all our problems are lapses of complacency, remain relatively easily correctable, and pale in comparison to past crises. By almost any barometer, the United States remains the most fortunate country in the world. We continue to be the...

The question is no longer on what has Obama backtracked, but rather on what has he not? The political problems with Obama's flipitis are twofold: one, it's coming late in the season. To defeat Hillary he went hard left in the void left by Edwards. But the primary dragged on so long, that when he recently flipped and flopped to leave the hard left on NAFTA, Trinity Church, Rev. Wright, FISA, gun control, campaign financing, death penalty, Iraq, Iran, Jerusalem, etc. he did so in the summer, not late winter. The result is that his formerly left positions were showcased...

One way to envision the McCain-Obama presidential race is as a boxing match — particularly like the famous Mohammed Ali championship fights. The deliberate McCain is like a Sonny Liston or George Foreman trying to cut the ring in half and force his lighter-footed opponent onto the ropes. For McCain, this comes in the form of numerous proposed town-hall debates, where he hopes that face-to-face questions and answers will fall on his less-seasoned opponent like sudden haymakers. In turn, Obama is like Ali; his style is to keep moving — and stay out of reach of his opponent. Obama does...

It is not hard to see why and how the middle classes, the poor, and the union members would like to see larger government programs and greater taxes on the wealthy, but why are so many in the upper-upper middle classes so vehemently pro-Obama? Are they that confident in the public schools, teachers' unions, swearing off their archaic gasoline engines, wanting restrictions on free trade and globalization, and living in mixed, integrated working-class neighborhoods? One paradox about the Obama campaign is that in terms of aggregate cash, most of his total donations are of the larger sort, and they tend...

I think we are beginning to see the full measure of the Obama general campaign strategy, framed along ten or so key directives that can allow the election of the most leftward candidate in American political history. So far the candidate himself needs no coaching, inasmuch he has proved to be one of the most pragmatic, flexible, and ambitious figures in recent memory, with superb handlers who understand the challenge of getting such a hard leftist past the suspicious American electorate. 1. “Maturing” Views. Move to the center on as many problematic issues as possible — whether FISA, NAFTA, talking...

June 26, 2008, 0:00 a.m. The Can't-Do SocietyWe have become a nation of second-guessing Hamlets. By Victor Davis Hanson Shakespeare warned us about the dangers of “thinking too precisely.� His poor Danish prince lost “the name of action,� as he dithered and sighed that “conscience does make cowards of us all.� With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is finally waking up to the fact that for decades the United States has not been developing known petroleum reserves in Alaska, in our coastal waters, or off the continental shelf. Jittery Hamlets apparently forgot that gas comes from oil...

We have become a nation of second-guessing Hamlets. Shakespeare warned us about the dangers of "thinking too precisely." His poor Danish prince lost "the name of action," as he dithered and sighed that "conscience does make cowards of us all." With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is finally waking up to the fact that for decades the United States has not been developing known petroleum reserves in Alaska, in our coastal waters or off the continental shelf. Jittery Hamlets apparently forgot that gas comes from oil -- and that before you can fill your tank, you must take...