Check this out. I'm pretty sure it's happened to you recently. You're standing by your car at the gas station, you've put the nozzle in the tank, swiped your credit card or your fast pass key in the machine and now you're watching the numbers, you're not checking out how many gallons are being poured into your engine, you're looking, staring in disbelief and shock, actually, as dollars and cents climb the ladder faster than you can snap your fingers. Twenty, $30, $40 ... $50 fast approaching. Depending on what kind of car you're driving, $60 could be here in a few seconds.

And you start to think: What else could I buy with this cash? Lunch for a couple people, four DVDs, two really good books?

The fact is you could buy a lot for what we spend on gas. The sad fact is that the price of gas today is the cost we pay for the incompetence of our politicians.

For decades, we've been told over and over that we have to develop alternative sources of energy, that we have to reduce our reliance on oil imports, that we have to make automobile manufacturers produce more efficient cars.

Well, look around. Not a whole lot has happened.

There is no national energy policy. We haven't made a single sacrifice to cut back on oil from countries like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, and hybrid vehicles are still a rarity on the road.

This week in the United States Senate, they were voting on a Constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning. Yesterday in Massachusetts, the governor held yet another press conference on, guess what? Gay marriage. How dumb is that?

All this incompetence as people on fixed incomes watch hard-earned money being poured into an automobile, as all of us are forced to make choices between filling the tank or taking the kids to the movies because those we elect never made the tough, but necessary, choice to come up with an energy plan to make the country stronger, the oil companies less greedy and the rest of us feeling like we're no longer being taken for a ride. And an expensive one at that.