Although the price of gas has continued to rise at a steady pace and is still setting new records in the United States, that’s about to end. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the price of gas is going to stabilize or go down.

Noooo. The price of gas is about to spike straight up through the stratosphere. An oil refinery in Texas exploded Tuesday night, which is always used by the oil companies to jack up the price of gasoline because – some people believe – they deliberately let demand outstrip refining capacity as a means of justifying high fuel costs. The Tuesday night blaze will mean already overburdened refineries will not be able to keep up demand, so the price of gasoline will rise.

But it will only rise a little bit because of the refinery fire. The looming spike in gas prices is going to come about because OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) is cutting production by four percent. This, of course, makes oil more scarce, forcing up the price of a barrel of crude, which in turn forces up the price of the product refiners use to make your gasoline.

I expect we’ll see $2 per gallon gas in this area before the end of summer, if not much sooner. Oh, well. As long as all Dubya’s buddies in the oil business are happy, I guess us poor folks who are paying twice as much for gas, electricity, and fuel oil shouldn’t complain. After all, in other countries gas already costs an arm and a leg. So we should be happy to be joining the fraternity of nations whose citizens spend more than half their paychecks on energy. Don’t forget, all the businesses that utilize energy in production, transportation, etc. (that would be just about all of them) are going to pass the hike along to…guess who?

Vilify President Carter all you want, but if the nation had listened to him in the late 1970s we wouldn’t be in this fix. He wanted to aggressively pursue alternative energy sources and dramatically reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil – Middle Eastern oil. But the American people just love the sound of gasoline being burned and the Democratically controlled Congress joined with the Republican minority to thwart Carter’s plan.

Today, we are more dependent on foreign oil than we were before the Arab Oil Embargo of the early ’70s. That means that our economy is more vulnerable to the whims of Middle Eastern Arabs than every before.

Is there a plan in place to cut our reliance on Middle Eastern oil? You know the answer. How could it be anything other than &uot;no&uot; since Dubya is a part of the cartel of oil barons that has its foot on our necks?

So maybe we should invade Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and all the rest of nations with the oil reserves we are so dependent upon. We’ve got Iraq, but we can’t get the oil out of there fast enough for the Iraqis to pay for their own reconstruction projects. The folks Dubya said would greet us as liberators keep blowing up the dad-burned oil pipelines!

On a topic related to this, no matter what is said and done, at least half of the country continues to love that Bush. His chief arms inspector returned from Iraq and said there were no weapons of mass destruction, which completely destroyed half of Dubya’s justification for invading Iraq.

His former Treasury Secretary said Dubya and Cheney were talking about invading Iraq when they walked into the White House for the first time – long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

And even though Dubya’s chief counter-terrorism expert says not only did Dubya put terrorism on the back burner before 9/11, he also says that invading Iraq has inflamed the Islamic world; creating more terrorists and making Iraq a hotbed for terrorism. Let’s not forget that Richard Clarke – an expert in the matter – agrees with almost every independent expert on the issue of terrorism, that prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Which, by the way, destroys the other half of Bush’s justification for the invasion. He also agrees with independent experts that the war in Iraq diverted military resources away from the real war on terrorism that was being waged in Afghanistan.

But wait! Dubya’s not done with justifying why he sent 150,000 troops to Iraq. His new WMD chief told Congress the other day that while Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, he had a secret plan – for which there is no documentation – to produce them. Looking at Google News on Wednesday, I found this headline in quotation marks: &uot;Saddam May Have Been Developing Ability to Produce WMD.&uot; The quote allegedly comes from Bush’s WMD Hunter Charles A. Duelfer. Saddam &uot;may have been&uot; developing &uot;the ability&uot; to develop weapons of mass destruction &uot;one day.&uot;

How many former Bush officials – that’s Bush officials – must come forward to tell the American people that Dubya is a liar before Americans actually start doubting this bad president? Clinton told one lie about having sex with an intern and was excoriated for the rest of his term and impeached.

Bush’s lies have cost nearly 600 American servicemen their lives, have crippled hundreds more, have cost the nation more than half a billion dollars already, have alienated us from our allies, have intensified hatred for us in the international community, have created a whole new generation of suicidal terrorists, and, by the way, have resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

I think it’s time to impeach Bush and get somebody in the White House who puts the nation’s well being ahead of his own selfish, petty, greedy agenda.