Burt Prelutsky

I'm sure I'm not the only person who periodically finds himself wondering if it's all just a dream or if he's found himself starring in one of the more bizarre episodes of "The Twilight Zone."

For instance, Bret Baier reported that Joe Biden recently had the following to say about Republicans: "Those guys don't have a sense of the average folks out there. They don't know what it means to be middle class."

At the time, he was addressing a group of average folks who were attending a $10,000-a-couple Obama fund raiser at the Georgetown mansion of Senator John and Teresa Heinz Kerry. They dined on organic steaks and white truffle mashed potatoes, purchased, no doubt, with federal food stamps.

I am willing to bet that these are the only regular folks in America who aren't concerned about the price of gas. It's funny how that works, though. When George Bush was in the White House, Democrats and the media insisted that he had more to do with soaring costs at the gas pump than OPEC, Exxon and Wall Street speculators, put together. It's only now, with Obama perched in the Oval Office, that we're hearing that the president has less influence on the price of gas than I do.

And for those of us who love nothing better than to see federal bureaucrats squirm, there was Secretary of Energy Chu telling a congressional committee that the last thing he wanted was soaring energy costs just a few days after saying that's exactly what he wanted. This is the same Stephen Chu who, in 2008, insisted that he wanted Americans to pay the same $10-a-gallon Europeans pay because it would hasten the day when wind and solar energy would power America.

Obama sprang to Secretary Chu's defense by pointing out that he had made that remark before he joined the Cabinet. But of course Obama had admitted in 2008, before he had a Cabinet Mr. Chu could join, that his energy policy would inevitably send gas prices skyrocketing. The telling points are, one, that Obama has waged constant warfare against the coal and oil industries, even though he now likes to boast that we are drilling for more oil than ever, even though it's thanks to Bush's policies and in spite of Obama's; and, two, even though Mr. Chu longed for $10-a-gallon gas before he joined the administration, it's because he voiced such lunacies that he was invited aboard.

Speaking of Obama's green energy program, you may have heard that Chevrolet has stopped production of the $40,000 Volt. Apparently, people weren't buying it, but whether it was the price tag or the fact that the batteries had a nasty habit of igniting, I suppose we'll never really know. I did think they could at least have tried a last ditch hard sell approach. "Buy the Volt! It's Explosive!"

On the subject of advertising, I laugh each time I hear the promos for "Fox and Friends." In case you've missed it, a voice asks, "Why waste your time anywhere else?" In my head, at least, that's only the start of a sentence that logically concludes, "When you can waste it with 'Fox and Friends'."

Although we are all justifiably suspicious of the left-wing claptrap professors are spouting to their young charges, once in a while a little good news seeps out. Not too long ago, Jack Chambless, a professor of economics at Florida's Valencia College, asked a class of sophomores what they felt they were entitled to expect from the federal government. The list included free tuition, jobs, money for a house and a financially secure retirement.

Prof. Chambless then proceeded to ask a few of his students to place their wallets on their desks. When they did so, Chambless snatched them up and pulled out the cash. He explained that it was his dream to have a retirement cabin in the woods, and this money would help pay for it.

Some object lessons are more graphic than others. I'm sure the victims squealed like pigs and I assume he gave them back their money, but if that demonstration didn't drive home the lesson of individual responsibility, I'd have flunked the entire class.

Finally, I would normally take comfort from a poll that reported that Obama's approval numbers among women fell in one month from 53% to 41%. What it tells me, however, is that 12% of women must live in a cave. Where else could they have been? How is it that in spite of over three years of ObamaCare; a trillion dollar Stimulus; Cash for Clunkers; kowtowing to our enemies; insulting our allies; pussyfooting with Iran; banning the Keystone pipeline; increasing our national debt by six trillion dollars; and waging class, race and religious, warfare, 53% of American women thought he was doing a bang-up job until it was suddenly costing them $4-a-gallon to fill their SUV gas tanks?

Mothers, fathers and grandparents, listen up. Inasmuch as most of Obama's female groupies tend to be of the unmarried variety, it's time you started talking to your daughters, nieces and granddaughters, about something other than their grades and if they're coming home for the holidays. The fact is, Obama won in 2008 because unmarried female voters went for him in huge numbers, and if we're not careful, it could easily happen again.

We conservatives have seen the enemy and, Pogo to the contrary, it is them!