By Scott Wright

Last week I watched as one of Faux News Channel's nameless GOP shills tried to convince the TV audience what a terrific job President Bush performed by selecting Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The talking head was trying to convince viewers that George Bush is, despite mounting stockpiles of evidence to the contrary, a misunderstood genius.

I don't know how to spell the sound I made when I heard that remark. It was sort of a prolonged squawk (to borrow a term from Monty Python) but with hysterical laughter interwoven throughout, and stretched out over a period of several minutes. George W. Bush a genius? I say, squire, it's going to cost you a few extra quid at the argument clinic to try and rationalize that bit of rubbish.

Anyway, if confirmed by the Senate, Gen. Hayden will replace Porter Goss, the former lawmaker who resigned May 5 after tussling with Hayden and his boss, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, over the future direction of the CIA.

The crux of the Faux News talking head's argument was this: Bush-Rove-Cheney & Co. purposely picked Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency, for a variety of reasons, among which is that they think they can use Hayden's military career to make the Democrats look bad for picking a fight with them over placing a general in charge of the civilian CIA. Goodness knows, Bush needs some kind of mindless distraction to make Americans forget how badly he has botched most everything else for the past six years.

The problem with Mr. Talking Head's notion is that Bush ain't nowhere near that smart, as evidenced by the fact that the cacophony of criticism you're hearing in the news over Hayden is coming long and loud from Bush's own party. Mostly, Republicans are miffed because of Hayden's 35 years in the Air Force and the fact that he headed up Bush's domestic wiretapping program which, in light of a May 11 story in USA Today detailing a huge database of secret phone records compiled by the NSA, is looking more sinister (i.e., illegal) every day.

Oops! I guess we should make that 10 billion and one blunders for Bush, the man conservative radio host and former Bush voter Doug McIntyre referred to last week in an online column as "the worst two-term president in the history of the country." (If you'd like to enjoy McIntyre's retraction of everything positive he's ever said about Bush, visit www.kabc.com. Reading his words made me feel warm all over.)

Back to Hayden. Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., have both voiced their reservations about the general. Several other Republicans, including House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., called Hayden's military background troublesome. Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Hayden should consider resigning from the Air Force in order "to send a signal of independence from the Pentagon." Her idea is a good one and probably what it's going to take to get Hayden confirmed, provided the secret phone records story doesn't sink him by the time this issue hits the street.

Actually, resigning might be a good way for Bush to get his approval rating out of the sewer (it dropped to 29 percent on Friday). The "worst two-term president in the history of the country" won't get an argument from me if he actually realizes what a terrible job he's doing and quits before he makes things any worse.

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Speaking of brains, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman must have gotten Dubya's share. Last week, Friedman brilliantly deduced the compelling correlation "between the price of oil and the pace of freedom." Economists, Friedman points out, have long taught "the negative effects an overabundance of natural resources can have on political and economic reform," and Friedman cites the following examples: Russian, where President Vladimir Putin is "awash in oil money," and does business with enemies of American, including Iran; Sudan, Friedman, points out, is also drowning in oil money and "ignores the world's pleas to halt genocide in Darfur"; and don't forget about Venezuela, Friedman reminds. There, President Hugo Chavez uses black gold to blackmail and "tells American and his domestic opponents to take a hike."

Friedman argues that our nation's dependency on foreign oil has resulted directly in a rise of what he calls "petro-ist" states, which he identifies as nations highly dependent on oil and gas for their economies to function and their authoritarian regimes to thrive. The result, Friedman claims, is what he calls "the First Law of Petro-politics," where "the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions." The higher the price of oil, the fewer basic freedoms the people of those countries enjoy. On the other hand, as the price of oil declines, Friedman writes, the more those countries are forced to move toward a more transparent style of government.

As Friedman points out, when oil was $40 a barrel Iran was "calling for a dialogue of civilizations." After oil climbed above $70 a barrel, though, Iran began "calling for the destruction of Israel."

Friedman brings his point home thusly: "Given the inverse relationship between the price of oil and the pace of freedom, any U.S. strategy for promoting democracy ... is doomed to fail unless it includes a credible plan for finding alternatives to oil and bringing down the global price of crude."

Say that reminds me, did you happen to catch the May 7 installment of "60 Minutes"? It turns out there's a significant solution to the problem of how to wean the United States off the teat of Middle Eastern oil, and some of it's sitting in a mason jar in your hillbilly uncle's freezer.

It's corn whiskey.

Well, not exactly whiskey, but that's basically what we're talking about. Technically, it is called ethanol. Dan Rather walked viewers through the rendering process during last Sunday's program, in a plant in Steamboat Rock, Iowa, (pop. 300).

A year ago, Rather reported, Steamboat Rock was little more than a struggling farming community until a group of farmers pooled their money together and built a factory that turns corn into ethanol. A year later, their oversized whiskey still is operating at maximum capacity and corn is selling for an extra 10 cents a bushel.

The main problem with ethanol is that it's not oil, so Big Oil has no incentive to promote it or sell it at any of their 170,000 gas stations across the country. After all, that might mean slightly less than the ga-zillion dollars they currently earn annually would continue to collect in their greedy pockets. Even though there are already over 300 ethanol plants in the U.S., only about 650 gas stations nationwide currently offer ethanol.

Auto manufacturers are building a few thousand cars every year that can run off ethanol (actually, the fuel those stations provide is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, a product called E85). But they have no incentive to make a million of 'em, because no one will buy one if there's nowhere to refill the fuel tank.

Rather said oil companies claim it costs $200,000 per station to add an E85 pump, but professor Daniel Kammen, of the Renewable Energy Lab at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, claims that's just more evidence of how greedy the oil companies really are. "The transition is pretty easy," he told Rather. "It looks like about $40,000 per station to change over and have ethanol-dedicated pumps." Kammen even told Rather he believes drivers across the nation will begin to see E85 pumps within the next few years. "I would bet that we will have enough ethanol stations within two to three years, at most," he said.

I'd love to see a local service station or two install an E85 pump within that time frame. And it would be nice if a few of the local dealerships kept a vehicle equipped to run on E85 on their showroom floors, just to support the effort. Hell, I'd buy an E85-burner if I knew there was somewhere to fill the tank. And I'll bet a few other people would, too. And maybe then a few more would, followed by few more, and so on. Before you knew it, maybe we wouldn't have to send American soldiers to the Middle East every time some cock-eyed ayatollah spit across his crazy neighbor's fence.

Why should a place as small as Centre, Alabama start the trend towards reversing this nation's self-destructive dependency on oil? Because the idiots in Washington, D.C. damned sure won't go first. Congress doesn't work for us, anymore -- they work for Big Oil. And Big Oil isn't going to stop squeezing us until their very last well runs dry.

Besides, we wouldn't have to go first, really. Steamboat Rock, Iowa has already beaten us to the punch.

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.