If lowering taxes to stimulate the economy were not enough, just look at what President Bush has done for us now.  In one of the widest ranging conspiracies in history, requiring a worldwide labyrinth of coordination with everyone who has anything whatsoever to do with the price of crude oil, not to mention controlling hurricane activity and geopolitical events, our president is driving down the pump price of gasoline by still-plummeting percentages since midsummer highs.

What a President!  The power!  The compassion!  The action!  By a guy who just gets it done and goes to bed by nine.

So what does he get for his effort?  Respect?  Gratitude?  A populace awestruck that he could and would take such devious, conspiratorial action to whack the profits of his buddies in Big Oil just for us?

Nay, nay, fellow citizens.  He gets 42 percent of the people, two-thirds of whom are Democrats, saying he "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's election." 

Well, actually, they didn't "say" that.  They had the statement read to them by pollsters at Gallup and agreed with it, according to an Associated Press article published in USA Today this week and widely circulated.  The nitpicking doesn't really matter -- factual precision rarely does anymore -- because surely they would have said it if they had thought of it.  They would have thought of it if pollsters didn't make it so effortless to form national opinion by reading those handy dandy statements to folks, a thousand at a time.  As Bob Dylan so prophetically wrote some decades ago, "It takes a pollster to find the weatherman."

If telling the truth (which we wouldn't question since two-thirds of them are Democrats), 42 percent of the American people have proven themselves to be such astute independent thinkers they are not about to fall for that supply-and-demand crap taught in every economics course in the country.  They know that's just a cover story, probably funded by Big Money, to hide the truth of price fixing on the way up and price fixing on the way down by the Big Fixers, themselves so smart that no investigation has ever found them.  After all, Big Banking has clearly driven home prices down so they can foreclose on the poor and downtrodden and resell to Big Real Estate to get the Big Housing Boom going all over again, at the secret request of President Bush.

We are talking about people who are not going to be fooled by Wal-Mart into buying those $4 generic drugs so that Wal-Mart can plant nanotechnology tracking devices in them, at the secret request of President Bush.  These are certified smart people, these 42 percent of us (two-thirds of whom are Democrats) who know a political conspiracy when pollsters show it to them.

It's just a crying shame that such smart people, who can think their way through even the most elaborate conspiracies, are sometimes not as practical as they should be.  Don't they know that the pollsters have their phone numbers, names and addresses and have already sold them to President Bush?

When four out of ten people on your block (two-thirds of whom might be Democrats) just disappear, probably a week or so before November's election, do not be alarmed.  Thank the President.  He just eased the demand for gasoline a bit more.  Not a lot of driving required at all those secret prisons.