The Grasshopper and the Ant

The Anonymous Liberal has written an intriguing post comparing our current looming energy crisis to the fable mentioned in the title. (I found it cross posted at Crooks and Liars)

In short, for the last three decades, the Republican Party has been a party of grasshoppers, blissfully encouraging the consumption of ever greater amounts of oil while doing absolutely nothing to prepare for the winter ahead. Indeed, they’ve done everything in their power to marginalize those who have warned that the good times can’t last and that we need to embrace conservation initiatives and develop alternative energy sources.

And now that the long-awaited winter has finally come and we’re all suffering under the weight of sky-high oil prices, what is the Republican response? They seize upon an imaginary quick fix–off-shore oil drilling–and they all rally around it, accusing their opponents of being the obstacle to lower gas prices. They preen and pose, convening fake sessions of Congress to show that they are the ones who really care about gas prices.

They ignore what their own government experts have acknowledged, that allowing further off-shore drilling won’t produce a drop of new oil for at least a decade and, even then, will do little if anything to reduce gas prices. Apparently in the Republican version of the fable, rather than admitting that he’d been short-sighted and reckless in not preparing for the winter, the grasshopper pretends that there’s actually a winter’s worth of food located just beneath his feet and that the only thing keeping him from digging it up is that damn ant.