Rep. Allen West (R-FL) apparently has issues with the cost of gasoline. However, he doesn’t see the irony of choosing to complain about the cost to fill up the tank of his Hummer H3, which is one of the most well known gas-guzzlers on the planet, in a Facebook posting:

People have asked me before is there any area where I could praise President Obama? Certainly, he has an impeccable penchant for understanding the power of the bully pulpit. President Obama is also very adept at promulgating deceptive language masquerading as policy, actually just insidious political gimmickry. This “tax policy” is an example as well as today’s speech on his “energy policy” shall be. Here is the bottom line, last night it took 70 dollars to fill the tank of my 2008 H3 Hummer, what is it costing you? What does it cost the President to fill his gas tank?

As you can imagine, reader comments on his post are not entirely kind. And then there’s this: “There’s very little policymakers can do today or could have done in the recent past to upset the price increase. In fact, thanks to a persistently low gas tax, the U.S. remains one of the cheaper places to fill up in the world.”

What the country needs is a concerted effort to come up with a coherent and rational energy policy beyond the “drill baby drill nonsense that we get every few years (or months) from Republicans who want to claim that they’ve got an energy policy. It also means standing up against NIMBY types who don’t want wind power or solar power sites built in their vicinities - or the transmission lines needed to bring in such power from more distant locations.

It means reaching consensus on gasoline taxes and possible alternatives to a tax on gasoline per gallon as vehicles become not only more efficient, but less reliant on gasoline (hybrids/plug-ins/all-electric). That means opening the door to vehicle mileage taxes in some form to make up for the shortfall in federal gas tax revenues that harm infrastructure funding over the long run rather than maintaining a dedicated fund for highways and mass transit.