My heart’s as broken as the Liberty Bell about saying goodbye to President Bush.

Last week, I visited the White House for a farewell lunch with the great man. Lots of other big time patriotic pundits were there, too. Rush ate all the good donuts. Barney humped Hannity’s leg. (I think he liked it). Boortz left his cell phone on, so for a second it was like a bunch of gay boys were singing from inside his pants.

Also, somebody farted. (I’m guessing the Mormon…)

We looked out onto the Rose Garden one last time, before the new guy starts using it to grow marijuana for his unicorn.

We asked the President if he had any regrets, besides not getting to nuke anybody?

Bush said he wished he’d drilled for oil up in Alaska.

“That’ll never happen now,” the President mused. “Not after the new guy beat What’s His Name and That Lady With The Glasses.”

The President even let us in on some top secret stuff, like how that nuclear football isn’t really a football – “Boy, was that a fox paw!” — and that his Secret Service nickname was “Smirky McHitler.”

“Lottsa Dems at Treasury…” Bush explained in a nervous whisper.

As we waved goodbye, I thought about our beautiful White House being taken over by draft dodgers and drunks and illegal-alien-lovers and idiots out to destroy our great capitalist system and — well, the excitement must’ve got to me right about then and I started getting a little mixed up…

Anyway, my fellow Americans, we’ve got one last day not to think about the horrible future let lies ahead. Let’s remember happier times gone by, back before they made a guy with a funny name the President, and let Mormons on the radio.

Energy is supposed to be Sarah Palin’s one area of strength, but she seems to either misunderstand basic energy policy regarding the use of Alaska’s natural energy reserves, or she deliberately lied in order to avoid a confrontation in a recent Wisconsin town hall meeting. From the Associated Press:

A questioner at a town hall-style meeting in Wisconsin said he had heard that at least 75 percent of the oil drilled in Alaska was being sold to China and said, if true, he would like to know why.

“No. It’s not 75 percent of our oil being exported,” Palin said, suggesting some of Alaska’s oil, in fact, may be going abroad but not that much.

“In fact,” she added, “Congress is pretty strict on, um, export bans of oil and gas especially.”

No Alaska oil has been exported since 2004, and little if any since 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration and the Congressional Research Service.

And Congress has never imposed outright bans on oil exports. Congress prohibited exports of Alaska oil in 1973 when the Alaska oil pipeline was built. But that ban was lifted in 1996 when there were large volumes of Alaska oil coming down from the North Slope and U.S. demand was soft.

The Alaska ban has never been reinstated.

As I continue to try and wrap my head around Sarah Palin, the GOP’s newest Vice Presidential pick (“a woman making strides toward the white house, good!”, “a woman who thinks the government has the right to tell her what her reproductive rights are, bad!”), a few wayward comments flying around the internet and media have gotten me really confused.  According to sources, Palin is on record stating that global warming is not man made, and that polar bears aren’t endangered

…What?

“A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location.” Palin stated as early as a few weeks ago to a conservative magazine for it’s September issue. “I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.”

As a moderate liberal, I can often support Republicans and Independents, as long as I believe their brain is in the right place. The thing is…denying humans have anything to do with global warming, and working to keep polar bears off the endangered list goes beyond politics and veers into …well…complete and utter wrongness.

“The state of Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species, Gov. Sarah Palin announced. She and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state’s northern and northwestern coasts.”

“Palin argued that there is not enough evidence to support a listing. Polar bears are well-managed and their population has dramatically increased over 30 years as a result of conservation, she said.”

Alaskan oil is more important than protecting wildlife?  Wildlife that has met the unfortunate conclusion time and time  and time again of drastic decrease or even full extinction in the next 50 years?

How is McCain and crew (not to mention Palin herself) going to twist her statements into sounding even remotely with the times?  You know who else thinks global warming is propaganda, and could give a rat’s ass about the polar bears?  My next door neighbor.  Who’s 85.  And who thinks the birds on the telephone wires are communicating directly with NASA.

Even though I’m proud of the fact that old white dudes are finally taking women seriously, I’ve been wary of Plain from the beginning, and this new information has done nothing to assuage my fears. Palin may be a powerful woman, but she ain’t no Hillary, and she certainly ain’t no environmentalist.

Our four-part plan for energy “independence”:

1. Open up northern Alaska to oil exploration and exploit it to the fullest. This of course would come at the expense of a few wandering environmentalist also know locally as the rabid-caribou.

2. Expand off shore drilling throughout the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the US. Surely, the millions of hormonally overcharged US beach goers in their gas thirsty over sized cars and SUVs would appreciate the necessity of the new views and what may eventually float ashore while they are bathing.

3. Invest in new domestic refineries and the expansion of existing production facilities to process all that new US domestic crude oil. For anyone who has driven along the a New Jersey section of the US 95, affectionately called by its colonial-era name “the turnpike”, adding more capacity to those refineries wouldn’t make surrounding air any more toxic than it already is – and what is that smell anyway.

4. Expand the use of alternative and renewable energies like: nuclear (the US can export the nuclear waste to Mexico since the majority of its population is moving to the US anyway); wind power (even the coast of Martha’s Vineyard is an ideal location in spite of the objections of US Senator Kennedy who unashamedly promotes that technology everywhere but not in his back yard); and, of course there is always that darling of global warming protagonists – solar power (since global warming produces more sunshine everywhere, this may even be commercially viable in Martha’s Vineyard).

The result of all this after five years or even ten years on the dependence US has on oil obliviously is none. Perhaps less obvious is that the result on the US dependence or, as the US President Bush says, the “US addiction” on foreign oil imports would be negligible. That right! The hard truth of the matter, as anyone remotely familiar with the oil industry will tell you, is that nearly 80% of all the oil imported into the US is used for transportation, principally consumer automobiles. Therefore it stands to reason that until there is a readily available alternative fuel source for the nearly 230 million cars, buses and trucks on the US highways, nothing…NOTHING…changes with respect to the US dependence on foreign oil and, by definition, its polices regarding the middle east and increasingly western Africa.