We didn't have to be here

Your Congress at "work:"

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure...

The lawmaker said Americans "are at the mercy" of OPEC for how much they pay for gasoline, which this week hit a record average of $3.79 a gallon.

Yes, we are at the mercy of the international oil market, which, despite our Middle East obsessions, includes more than OPEC. Truth is, we don't use OPEC oil nearly as much as the Europeans or Japanese do. We just use more oil in general, and for some reason think having it supplied cheaply is a God-given right.

Yes, we are at the mercy of the international oil market, and have known as much since the 1970s, when the "oil weapon" was first used to attempt to influence our foreign policy. But instead of decreasing our dependence these past three decades, we zoomed ahead with purchases of SUVs that never went off road. We tinkered with alternative energy, but never saw it as a vital ingredient to national security. Essentially, we whistled past the graveyard. Until now.

Now we're filing international lawsuits to sustain our habit, even as Americans finally realize driving the Hummer to the corner market is a losing economic proposition. If I were OPEC, I think I'd remind Uncle Sam that any settlement would be out of the billions of dollars they already hold of our currency in reserve... and that it would be part of the process of them finally turning those reserves loose on the world currency market, essentially making the dollar next to worthless.

We don't hold a good hand here, folks. And we dealt the cards to ourselves.