Because he’s a terrorist target, I guess

Yet another example of the Republican’s inability to learn from the past:

The Republican House leadership, hopping aboard the new anti-oil-addiction campaign, staged a fine media event yesterday at a BP gas station at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE that featured a hydrogen-powered car.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.), along with other top House Republicans, was photographed in and around the snappy blue General Motors HydroGen 3 van.

The event followed one by Senate Democrats on Wednesday, who rode in their gas guzzlers to an Exxon station a block from their offices to blame Republicans for high fuel prices.

Hastert, who appeared to have walked to the station, left in the very fuel-efficient vehicle, apparently headed for his office. But he went only a block or so before he got out and stepped into his pre-positioned gas-guzzling armored SUV to take him back to his office. Alert photographers, suspecting a ploy, had followed the speaker and captured the bait-and-switch.

Hastert’s spokesman insists that the speaker’s security detail claimed it was too dangerous for him to ride in the fuel-cell van, demanding that he ride in the armored SUV.
I despair over the complete lack of intelligence that is a hallmark of the current crop of conservative Republicans. I mean, can’t they see how easy it would have been to score points at the expense of the Dems by showing the speaker actually using a clean fuel vehicle, unlike the gas-guzzling display by the Democrats just the other day?

Meanwhile — and I use that word a lot when I wrap up a blog entry — just sitting in a fuel cell car is not actually the same as doing something to facilitate their adoption, and is even farther from doing something to facilitate the development of energy sources that are more efficient than hydrogen, which is not as clean and green and efficient as they’d lead you to believe.