ADullAche

If you want me to count that high, I gotta take my shoes off.

 

 

So, I’m doing my usual tour de channels the other day, seeing what talking head is talking to what other talking head, and what they’re talking about, and I come upon giant talking head Rick Sanchez on CNN, who is talking to a couple of Obama talking heads. (No, I don’t recall their names, and at the risk of sounding headiest; all talking heads, regardless of who they’re talking for, are starting to look the same to me.)

The topic of the segment was the “gas tax holiday.” (You know, that thing both Hillary and McCain think is a good idea - anyone else worried that those two are on the same page?)

You don’t need to be an Obama supporter to realize what a cynical, “let them eat cake” back of the hand it is to everyone who has to shell out $3.50 or better for a gallon of gas. (And that is overlooking the fact that this thing, this “holiday,” will never get through congress, and even if it did – which it won’t, it won’t ever make the floor – Bush would veto it in a $120 a barrel minute. You don’t think he’d distract his pals at Exxon from counting their money do you?)

The Obama people, neither of whom I recognized as former Noble Prize winners in Economics, explained how, at the end of the day, saving .18 a gallon ain’t doing diddly to help us out of this mess Cheney and the oil barons have stuck us in. (By the way, every economist on the planet agrees with Obama, but logic and reason have already checked into a room in Orlando, so we all need to lower our expectations…a lot.)

If you run the numbers – and here they are:

X= miles driven

Y= gallons used

Z= .18.4 per gallon

You save about $28 bucks for the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day. And that’s dependant on the oil companies not raising the price, or consumption going up because instead of spending $4 a gallon we’re living the good life and only ponying up $3.82, and with what we save, we’re all renting big-ass rv’s and hitting the open road. I don’t know about you, but this is year I want to drive the entire Canadian border.

After the explanation, Sanchez, with a head that certainly looks big enough to have a fully developed neo-cortex, sez something along the lines of, “That all sounds very complicated.”

Then, to put a finer point on it, and to show he’s a man of the people, and the people are obviously as thick-witted as he is, he goes to bat for joe and jane lunchbox out there in the heartland, and tells us all, they don’t get it either.

$28 is a tough number. It’s so much bigger than $4 or even $11.

I think Kurt Gödel said $28 was the key to one of his Incompleteness Theorems. And I’m pretty sure $28 is the missing component to Fermat’s Last Equation. Not to mention just how many people $28 would buy health insurance for. And I’m certain $28 would finish rebuilding Iraq.

So I can see how a staggering numeral like $28 would catch even a seasoned anchor a little flat-footed.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Political Satire/Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.