Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

Great Leaps

The book, “The Five Thousand Year Leap,” suggests America’s quest for liberty and limited government stimulated civilization to leap 50 centuries into the future. It is as if God had granted mankind certain natural rights and America’s framers were honoring His desires as they penned our Constitution. However, because God also granted us freewill, rather than forward, sometimes man leaps backwards, and I experienced just such a regression this weekend.

The trophy wife and I attended the funeral of a good friend we had known for 40 years. The service was in Bozeman and after we said our goodbyes, we hit the interstate for home. We passed a couple semis at the mouth of the canyon and while changing lanes our right front tire smacked a pothole hidden by a puddle. We wobbled to the shoulder where we spotted another motorist changing his right front tire, apparently an earlier victim of our same pothole. Once stopped, I discovered a huge chunk of sidewall torn free from our tire. We purchased this 2018 Mini-Cooper in December, and it came with run-flat tires, a completely useless option for country folk more than 50 miles from the nearest tire shop and driving at times outside normal business hours. We had cell service and found a tire shop which miraculously had a couple tires which matched ours, so we called for a tow trailer. Had we been rolling on conventional tires this would have been a 10-minute breakdown, so this run-flat leap backward sucked nearly three hours and 400 dollars out of my life. As much as we scoot around the country seeing grandkids, a run-flat mishap in a small Colorado town with a Dairy Queen and no tire shop, could have stranded us for days. Before this column is printed, I will have replaced all my run-flats with regular tires, plus added a spare, jack, and lug wrench to the trunk.

Run flats are a leap backwards but not history’s worst as President Biden owns the Green Jacket in this event. Mr. Biden recently decreed his EPA will save the planet by raising emission standards to drive the cost of gasoline powered vehicles to astronomical levels. You will either drive an EV or you will get nothing, and like it. Picture this: It is January, and you are stranded 31 miles west of Circle, Montana in an EV with a dead battery. The wind chill is 50 degrees below zero and your only source of heat is the fake warm glow you feel because you bought the lie you are saving the planet. Pursuing this socialist dream is a 5,000-year leap backwards but somehow it makes sense to Democrats. They are strange.