stimulate the economy with a single green-jobs subsidy! He creates jobs by posting purple signs on roadsides! He brings the Free World to the brink of destruction with one remark to an outgoing Russian president! (Oops, sorry.) We thought we had seen it all, and that there were no more signs or miracles to be revealed, but now the President has mastered time travel! He has utilized the same fluid space-time continuum that manages to make George Bush responsible for all of the nation’s ills three years after his term in office to travel back in history and invent the hybrid vehicle! Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
It’s a crock.
In 2004, Lexus released the RX 400h a hybrid SUV. In 2012, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that President Obama was responsible for the creation of the hybrid vehicle. Specifically, the Secretary noted that hybrids probably would not have existed had it not been for the president signing the executive order for Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards or “C.A.F.E”, which he did in 2010. LaHood also credited himself and EPA boss Lisa Jackson for doing the heavy lifting on C.A.F.E. That will have cars getting 54.4 miles per gallon by 2025. But by then the fossil fuels industry will be as extinct as the dinosaurs from which they extract their oil and anyone who can still afford a car will be zipping around in a cute little electric peanut-mobile, so who cares anyway?
For those of you who did the math and realized that 2012 minus 2004 equals 8, here is another set of numbers to crunch. Although Mr. LaHood and Ms. Jackson may be savoring the flavor of a well crafted executive order, C.A.F.E. actually has its origins in 1975. (That would 37 years ago, if you were still working on the last math problem.) It was enacted by congress after the 1973 Oil Embargo.
Apparently the Way-Back Machine in the Rose Garden can’t go back that far, but since the guys at NASA aren’t working on anything cool like space travel, maybe they can tweak it for the President. He could give Al Gore a hand coming up with the internet. Before long, the President’s name might well appear at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Divine Comedy and the Collected Plays and Sonnets of Barack Obama, I mean William Shakespeare; they being important documents that would not have existed without this administration.
Lexus came up with its hybrid not because of an executive order that dates back to 1975, but because Lexus wanted an edge in the market. We got an environmentally friendly SUV because Lexus wanted to make money by trying to meet a demand, not because it kowtowed to an executive fiat. It was the Free Market at work, not the government.
If the Administration wants to take credit for doing something good for American drivers, it might try letting companies drill for energy on public land, and it might have the EPA call of its dogs and step back within its original bounds of advising state agencies instead of replacing them. That might have a bit more credibility than trying to position the President as the man who invented the hybrid car and for all we know the electric light and the wheel.
Speaking of Democrat propaganda, we have a Left Wing BS alert: on Tuesday, Mitt Romney made a campaign stop at Central High School in Grand Junction Colorado. The President had made a stop there earlier in the year and he drew a crowd of 1600. The liberal media had predicted that Romney would not do nearly as well and was already declaring the event a wash on Tuesday. So you might want to ask your favorite left-wing journalist if they want fries with order of crow, since Romney drew 4000 people. Some having to sit in the overflow section outside of the school. He spoke to the people outside before moving on to the main event, and those people were still waiting for him when he emerged from the school. But I’m sure you’ll read all about that in the papers or see it on network T.V.