"I can't believe these bums are beating us!" That was a famous coach's remark; it should be the Republican National Committee's slogan. Despite all the actual harm done by more than a half-century of Democratic Congresses, somehow they manage to put the blame on the GOP.

Examine the record:

Gas is $4 a gallon, yet we have not built a single new refinery since Jimmy Carter's presidency. Ninety percent of America has been closed off to drilling, including a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- a frozen mud flat the relative size of a dinner plate on a football field. Liberals spin prophesies of environmental armageddon (the same horror stories we heard before the Alaska Pipeline was built).

The same goes for our own coastline. Mexico, which claims a 200-mile limit on its coast, drills and sell our oil to us -- at $140 a barrel. How did this come about? Three words: Democratic special interests.

Nuclear energy? Same story. While even France -- a country whose technology peaked with the bidet -- produces enough power to provide half their energy needs and sell it to their neighbors, the United States cannot build even one plant. Why? The China Syndrome, a movie that, not surprisingly, starred Hanoi Jane Fonda and had as little acquaintance with the truth as she with patriotism. The Democrats chant "Three Mile Island!" The only harm done at TMI was to the financial interests of insurance companies and operators by trial lawyers, the Democrats' core constituency.

The housing fiasco, too, should be laid at Congress' doorstep. When Democratic special interests strong-armed financial institutions to loan money to the unqualified, or face their malevolent oversight, banks lent money they shouldn't have. But instead of taking the blame, now the Democratic Congress is making the banks the bad guys.

And their messiah is winning, selling "change" to the electorate? P.T. Barnum was positively prescient.