If you're Republican, sometimes life's just as simple as this:
Fred Banaszak of Colgate, Wisconsin, wrote a letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In the letter, which ran this morning, he recounts how he ruined his gasoline-powered leaf blower by using fuel containing a few percent mixture of ethanol -- which is widely sold at the pump in Wisconsin and elsewhere as regular fuel.
"I tried to look for gasoline stations that sold non-ethanol regular gasoline in southeastern Wisconsin," Fred reported. "There aren't any!"
He ended the letter with a finger-pointing exercise: "I'm so mad that all I can say now is: THANK YOU, OBAMA!"
You see, as Fred thinks he knows, America and the petroleum industry didn't discover the benefits of ethanol as a fuel additive until January 2009, when Obama took office. That must be so, since Fred blames President Obama for its widespread use. Far be it from us to note that, exactly a century earlier, Henry Ford designed his Model T to run on a mixture of gasoline and alcohol, calling it the "fuel of the future."
But never mind. It's so easy and simple to blame Obama. What's next? Your bothersome "Obama hangnail"? Another "Obama pothole" on your non-stimulus, unrepaired street?
Fred's lament is just a variation on earlier complaints over the past couple of decades. Among the more egregious:
* The claim that the evil federal government forced us all to give up our leaded gasoline, beginning, of course, in 1973 under then-President Barack Obama -- I mean, Richard Nixon. Never mind that the emitted lead clearly was turning a large plurality of the American population into nincompoops. Some stores actually sold black-market slugs of lead fuel additive to the faithful, for a little while.
* When in 1978 the government agreed with massive research showing that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying the ozone layer, it banned them. Freon was one such CFC, used in refrigerators and air conditioners. Foot-draggers insisted they needed their Freon, and hoarded huge quantities of the stuff before it left the shelves. And they must have been right, because look how poorly your modern air conditioner or home freezer works! Awful! Or not.
Similarly, your prototypical teabagger is now outraged that "Obama" is forcing us all to use evil fluorescent light bulbs, which purport to save energy but which really pollute your head with buzzing noises and perhaps with deadly mercury vapors (the new bulbs do contain tiny amounts of that poisonous element, but health experts do not consider it a significant risk). It's amusing to now see the neo-luddites actually using the threat of pollution as a rationale for continuing to create far more pollution.
In any event, the teabagger outcry led to last week's Republican insistence in Congress to delay part of the US Department of Energy's updated efficiency rules for light bulbs, which were mandated in a law signed by (ahem!) President George W. Bush in 2007 and set to take effect next year. The standards are designed to help the US use less electricity, requiring that traditional incandescent bulbs become 30 percent more energy-efficient by 2012. And that's where manufacturers are already going, all by themselves, because it makes economic and market sense to do so. So the GOP move is pure window dressing. But, hey, Americans loves them some purdy curtains.
So, you see, incandescents weren't really banned by the Bush-signed law, but Obama is killing the traditional light bulb! Or not. But that's not important, right now. What's important is the continuing certitude that Obama is forcing us to do things we don't want to do! Unpleasant things. Sordid things. Or .... something.
And what is that something? Ah, we know! It's the awful TARP bill that handed out hundreds of billions of federal dollars to big financial institutions! Obama is wrecking the economy! He should be impeached or defeated next November because... what? You say it was the Bush administration that pushed TARP through? Oh, well. That's different. Never mind. Or maybe the teabaggers will just keep right on being mad. Because: A mimosa mind is a terrible thing to waste.
So kick back, light up a smoke, and shake your head in disbelief at all the good things Big Gummint is taking away from us, including our freedom. And meanwhile, we in the teabagger movement will keep thinking up new outrages to share with you, and to blame on Obama and his ever-so "failed" presidency.