“Yes, we need a long-term solution, but how about a little relief now?” the New York senator said. “When we bailed out Bear Stearns to the tune of $30 billion I didn’t hear all these people going ‘Oh, my goodness, we shouldn’t do that.’ Everybody just said, ‘OK, fine. We have to do it. They’re in a pickle; let’s fix it.’ Well, what about the millions of Americans who are facing their own challenges economically?” she said.

Oh for pete’s sake, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Why do you speak in this fatuous tongue of blinding naivete? First of all, there was no need to jump on board McCain’s idiotic plan, and to persist in defending this kind of frivolity is not the best way to tread water in your floundering campaign.

The problem with your short term relief is that it doesn’t curb the behaviors of Americans who maintain lifestyles with a significant portion of their income devoted to filling up their gas tanks. The problem with a gas tax holiday is that it encourages people to keep abusing and overusing fuel. The problem with a quick fix is that it discourages a serious investigation into alternative energy resources. The problem with your Bear Stearns example is that you might be able to change management and direction of a company through board meetings, but that’s not quite the same as changing the minds of millions of individual Americans. The problem with your analogy is that the “bail out” was actually a loan from the federal reserve, and how do you think people will feel when its time for the government to collect? The problem with your temporary relief is that you’re forgetting how awful it’ll be when the government has to recoup these expenses afterwards, and citizens will be chopping off limbs and offering first-borns to pay. The problem is that you pretend to be one of the common people, thinking that you can be seen as empathetic to our gasoline price woes, but you instead come off as an ignorant desperate politician with no genuine desire to make real changes. The problem is that what this country needs is a leader that can look into the future and offer the long term solution that we can fight towards, and not the teenage babysitter who offers us a lollipop to make us forget about the real problems.

The problem is that the only people who could actually see this tax relief holiday as a good idea, are blindingly thickheaded with economic expertise comparable to a third grader, and they all seem to be working as your policy advisors.