While we were sleeping

Taking a good, hard look around is something of a shock. There's a surreal look to the world, almost as if we had just emerged from an eight-year coma.

The Bush administration just admitted out loud what we already knew -- America is in the throes of a major energy crisis.

A really, really scary one that seemed, somehow, to have emerged overnight. It didn't really -- it's been building for a long time -- but anybody who wasn't part of our national coma was too preoccupied watching Bad Billy get away with murder (and everything else) to notice.

America's "energy policy" for the last decade has been largely biblical (eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die).

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While we were sleeping, America's dependency on foreign oil jumped from 35 percent in the 1970s to 56 percent today. Our oil addiction back in the '70s gave OPEC enough leverage to all but cripple America for almost a decade. Compared to our current situation, the '70s look good.

Anybody who can remember the Oil Crisis of the 1970s knows how bad it was. I've already torn up a dozen efforts to describe it for those who didn't live through it. It's too much like trying to describe color to the blind.

Suffice to say that a gallon of gas went from a quarter to a dollar and a quarter overnight and within a couple of years, mortgage interest rates were in double digits and inflation ate up pay checks faster than they could be earned.

Energy conservation efforts begun during the Carter administration aimed at reducing both consumption and foreign dependency. At some point, without anybody really taking notice of it, they sort of evaporated.

The "minicars" of the '70s and '80s gave way to the gas guzzling SUVs of the '90s, people started turning up their thermostats again, and, thanks to our defense of the Kuwaiti oilfields in the Gulf War, America again had a stable energy supply flowing out of the Middle East. Or so we thought. Maybe it was just a dream.

While we were sleeping, somebody turned Russian democracy into Soviet-style totalitarianism. Vladimir Putin appeared out of nowhere and -- poof! -- he was president of Russia. We hardly noticed where Yeltsin went.

Rumors that the Russian presidential election was rigged got no more attention than rumors that Yeltsin was ousted in a silent coup d'?tat.

The Moscow Times recently reported that it had documented enough fraud in the last presidential election to "question its legitimacy."

Although the Moscow Times is an English language newspaper, it might as well have been in Russian for all the attention the story got in the West.

While we were sleeping, American troops were deployed in dozens of different hot zones around the world for no apparent reason insofar as U.S. national interests are concerned, and then simply forgotten about.

Here's a pop quiz: Name five places in the last eight years where America put troops on the ground, in harm's way and under foreign command. How many of you included Eastern Slavonia?

While we were sleeping, the Chinese morphed from the butchers of Tiananmen Square to honored guests in the Lincoln Bedroom with revolving door access to all our top-secret national laboratories along the way.

Taiwan recently issued a sarcastic "thank you" to the United States for providing China with the technical know-how needed to develop the three hundred missiles that now threaten it.

On the other hand, Beijing feels confident enough of its place in America's heart to issue 'stern warnings' about what weapons we're allowed to sell to Taiwan.

Last week, Beijing read Washington the riot act in advance of a pending decision to sell Taiwan four destroyers equipped with the state of the art Aegis battle system. The Chinese feel that will make their planned invasion of the tiny Asian democracy more difficult.

In the same vein, the Russians don't want us to develop a missile defense shield over our own country because it might make it harder for them to destroy America in a nuclear attack.

While we were sleeping, some idiot in Washington somewhere decided maybe we should turn our foreign policy over to the Russians and Chinese to critique and modify while we went about the business of gutting our military and nuclear defenses.

While we were sleeping, Alan Greenspan managed to do a little profit taking on behalf of the Federal Reserve's stockholders, raising interest rates until stock brokers changed their advice from "sell" to "jump."

The Nasdaq that only a year ago broke 5,000 is now simply broke. And so are the 401k accounts of millions of Americans.

A significant portion of America is still asleep, dreaming dreams and talking nonsense. The Democrats announced last week that the reason for America's meteoric plunge downward was Dubya's repeated use of the "R" word during his campaign.

At the same time, the myth that Bill Clinton "did a lotta good" while we were sleeping continues to get plenty of media attention. Specific examples are evidently being kept on a "need to know" basis.

It's about time somebody set the alarm, 'cause it's way past time to wake up.