Let's pick a day and all inflate our tires together

Thursday, August 07, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I love how Barack Obama picked up the ball and threw it back in the Republican's faces. Indeed, they do annoy with their ignorance, they're not really that stupid, but they delight in provoking a reaction.  

It's not even smart politics as Maureen Dowd pointed out yesterday in her eloquent NYT column, where she nailed it about McCain and former President Bill Clinton, and former #1 black political leader Jesse Jackson. A generation of alpha males has been left behind in the Obama juggernaut, and they're not happy.  

Obama did something very good, if it's true that properly inflating our tires would save up to 4 percent of the oil we use. That's actually a lot of savings. If we spend $700 hundred billion a year on oil, 4 percent is $29 billion. We're not so rich that we can look the other way at an opportunity to, as a nation, save that much money.  

And listen to this carefully -- we need something positive we can do together to help all of us. It's been a long time since we had a national project. The Republicans laugh at Jimmy Carter's sweater, but that just tells us one thing, they've been running things too damned long. (And Bill Clinton was no better, with his "depends what is is" bullshit.) It's time to get smart. 

We need to find more ideas that can make us $29 billion, again and again. We need to think like a corporation that wants to return to profitability because that's what's going to heat our homes and keep us moving. We've run out of frontiers to exploit, and now we have to face the reality that we must learn how to live with each other. The sneering and bullying must be over, and Obama did what we all have to do when faced with willful ignorance -- tell it to fuck off, we don't have the time for this nonsense, we're busy solving problems, no time to argue with idiots. 

So I suggest we pick a day, next week or the week after, and help each other check our tire pressure and fill those tires and start saving the money -- now. It would be something nice the oil companies could help with too. Get on our side for a change. 

Micah: "How do we make this something real so that others sense they're part of something larger?"