The latest energy crunch has a familiar ring By Curt Andersen News-Chronicle All of a sudden, the entire country is writhing in what smells like a manufactured energy crisis. Conservatives have been whining about the need for an energy policy. I can only imagine what kind of unmitigated booga-booga-booga plan the oil lobby will dream up. Just having a plan doesn't mean that it's a good one. I wonder if they have thought through their plans. I wonder if the oily boys will be hoisted by their own petard. Those of us old enough to remember the last two oil crises (1973 and 1978) know that we Americans took it for just so long. We had to line up for what could be hours to get gasoline. Finding fuel made hard work out of getting to work. We responded by unloading our gas-guzzling American cars and bought foreign cars that got twice the gas mileage. I heard one man say at the time that people were fooling themselves if they believed that they were going to "save enough money" to justify buying the fuel-efficient cars. He made a good point but missed the biggest one. We didn't buy those foreign cars to save money on fuel. We bought them so that we had enough fuel to get to work. It was, at least partly, those purchases and the lessening demand on gasoline that eased the crisis, but we have not been the same since. Few prices went back down for anything that required any sort of energy for production. Dark clouds do have a silver lining. We got a new generation of American cars that get better gas mileage and run much better than before. What used to be called "Detroit" got its pride back for awhile. It is unfortunate they have gone back to the old thinking, and are building gas-guzzlers again. Any rise in fuel prices will negatively affect sales of low gas mileage vehicles, hitting our domestic manufacturers where it hurts ... right in their profit leaders, the SUV and truck markets. I find it surprising that Detroit isn't gunning for the oily boys already. The oil companies are not just greedily feeding on us. They are harming our country, and the directors should be tried for treason. The inflation that is likely just down the road will make us weaker, but we are still strong enough to respond? At what point do they stick us fatally? At what point do we mess up their party? We beat OPEC last time and we can do it again. We'll be even more creative this time. As I consider the slowing economy, assisted by the "energy crunch," I have a theory that one of the reasons why the economy worked so well under President Clinton was that he decided to pay off the national debt instead of the tax break policies of past presidents. I think that citizens, who have more sense because we are not daily being bribed by lobbyists, realized that finally, someone was going to do the right thing. President Bush has gone back to the old days of tax breaks, which were constantly heating up the economy, then dropping it on its head, rather like a sugar-buzz. Up! Down! How many will lose their jobs in this round of good ol' boy economics?