They cling to their guns, their religion and, oh, uh, coal

Big eared jackass.

When I took intro to micro/macro economics my freshman year it was a huge struggle. Well, mainly because the lectures were at 8 am, I'm not a morning person and I went out drinking every night that I could get a permission slip from my liver. I pretty much had to cram for a week before the midterm and final and got by thanks to the miracle of short-term memorization and an even higher than Biden IQ rather than a genuine grasp of the subject matter.

Yet even as an 18-year-old drunken retard more interested in plotting my way into Sally's underpants than plotting a Phillips Curve, I could simply look across the Lehigh campus and see Bethlehem Steel in a death spiral. Call it real life 101. They were getting crushed by overseas steelmakers who had more modern facilities, far lower wage and pension burdens and they simply couldn't compete anymore. Not a problem unless you lived in a region where steel is made, like, say Pennsylvania and Ohio. After all, it is certainly better for the economy as a whole when builders and other users can purchase steel at the lowest possible price. A dynamic economy is continually evolving.

But you'd have to have been beaten unconscious with an idiot stick not to understand that increased energy costs probe every orafice of our existence. And it is the most regressive tax there is. While I temporarily welcome the middle finger this extends to any number of battleground states - especially ones already scarred by the loss of industry - it is nonetheless bewildering that someone this clueless could conceivably be our president thirty-something hours from now.

And the idea that emissions fines/fees will fund alternative energy development should make everyone's skin crawl. The government would still be plodding along trying to map the human genome if Craig Venter hadn't told the HGP to bite a pillow and gone off to do it himself. That's really what we need right now: The Department of Energy except oil, coal, nuclear and wind if it ruins the view from the Kennedy compound.

It takes a real stroke of genius to say something which is both politically foolish and foolish foolish. But there's nothing to see here. He was misunderstood.