"The price of Oil is not high. This is not a supply issue with regard to the supply of oil. “Drill Now” campaign is essentially full of shot. I’m not opposed to drilling more but to think that oil supply is the root of the problem is just a distraction."

You couldn't possibly be more wrong.  Oil is precisely the issue.  While it's true that there is no immediate supply problem everyone knows that any small interruption is going to kick the stock markets hard in the ass.  That's why they are buying commodities instead of stocks.  That's why the price of oil spikes at the slightest hint that supplies will get shorter.  This is the new model for oil futures so get used to it.

This is just the beginning.  The supply will tighten up and tighten up.  Small glitches in supply will become economic events.  If demand doesn't fall off due to the high prices we will begin to enter a period of true shortages.  Watch the airlines.  They are the canaries in the coal mine because of the nature of their business.  They will begin to fail one by one.  There will be a larger and larger number of businesses reporting lower profits or downright losses as their cost of production rises and rises with the price of energy.  The internet model of business will suffer as UPS and Fedex and the Postal service sag under the weight of rising fuel costs.   The stock markets are going to slip and slip and slip.  One big event like a bad hurricane in the Gulf or a military event with Iran and they are going to tumble hard, not like the gentle stuff of the past several weeks.

The credit and mortgage crisis will be greatly aggravated by the rising cost of everything.  Mortgages that were formerly sound will start to fold up.  It will no longer be a subprime loan crisis but a general loan crisis as consumers find themselves throttled beyond their ability to keep up and start to walk away from debt that was seen as reasonable in better times. 

The time to have done something real would have been during the last decade of cheap fuel prices.  The action would have been to make a national effort to move to more efficient modes of transportation, like rail, smaller and fewer automobiles, and to enhance and encourage every single alternative source of energy.  The administration chose instead to encourage waste and inefficiency among the public while using military power to sieze control of new supply sources.  The Democrats have preached the gospel of alternative fuels and conservation but have not walked the walk.  The die is now cast.  Our economic future will be set long before any domestic production can be ramped up.  Domestic production would have to double to have a real and lasting effect on prices and that is a pipe dream.   It ain't gonna happen.  They don't even know if there are substantial reserves in these offshore areas they are screaming about. 

Cheney said early in his presidency that conservation was not the American way.  We're now going to pay for that short sighted stupidity.  The stupid bastard still has no real energy plan besides attacking the Middle East and drilling frantically in offshore waters.   The new American way is upon us.  It consists of spiraling energy costs and forced downgrading of our standards of transportation.  The infrastructure changes may well prove to be beyond our financial ability now.  Republicans will find that in circumstances like this the national debt does in fact matter, as people lose faith and confidence in our ability to repay and begin to dump the dollar with ever increasing urgency.

Each of these things has been foretold over the last few years ad-nauseum.  They didn't want to listen, didn't want to act.  Now we pay.