It didn't take long for the promises made on the campaign trail by our president-elect to start crumbling in the harsh light of reality.

It only took one visit to the White House, where the current occupants were described ad nauseum by the Democrat-run American Terrorist Media as "gracious," and the promise to be out of Iraq in 16 months was forgotten, while closing Guantanamo went from a no-brainer to a complicated issue.

Of course, we've won in Iraq. Our troops still are there, but in what would have been termed the "mopping up" phase in World War II, so it is much easier to put Iraq on the back burner and move on.

The Iraqi cabinet has agreed on a format where US troops will be gone in 2011, and even if that is far more than the 16 months the president elect said it would take for him to get the troops out, it still is a non-issue as long as the Democrat-run American Terrorist Media ignores it.

Guantanamo is a similarly flexible issue. During the campaign, Guantanamo's immediate closure was considered a sure thing. But after one visit with the sitting president the questions of what to do with a collection of murderous Islamo-fascists became a new and far more difficult puzzle.

Some of these fiends have been set free over the last six years, and what have they done? They returned to the battlefield and took part in the killing again! I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that rabid, mad-dog Islamo-fascists return to their sworn duties and murderous lifestyles when released by a humane and understanding culture.

I have one suggestion for the president-elect. Try treating the terrorist prisoners the way the US government treated the Marines and soldiers who were falsely charged with crimes against terrorism in Iraq. Let's see how terrorists enjoy solitary confinement in reprehensible conditions, no access to legal counsel, attacks on the families of the accused - by their own government, all of which were the norm for our troops falsely accused of murder.

There was no Red Cross, no ACLU for our people, so why should there be for serial terrorist murderers? Treat the terrorists the way the government treated our own troops and the War on Terror will end in a month.

Frankly, I expected the president-elect to change his stance on some items. Campaign promises are made to be broken, you can see that by just matching up promises with after-election actions. Reality is much different and if the president-elect wants to have any chance of being considered an effective president he has to deal with reality, not with Democrat talking points as broadcast by the Democrat-run American Terrorist Media.

So let's talk about the one thing I was really hoping to see from whomever was elected to the White House - a full-bore effort to develop viable alternative energy forms that would lead to a drastic reduction in America's dependence on gasoline and other petroleum products for energy. This in turn would have led to a dramatic reduction in our reliance on foreign sources of oil, we would have shut off the flow of America dollars to countries that support terrorism and have secondary agendas to bring down America, and also would have drastically cut down on fossil fuel pollution.

Everybody was talking about it before the election. Everybody was screaming about it last summer when oil was $140 per barrel, gasoline was $4.50 per gallon at the pump and travel become horribly expensive for the average driver.

But what happened since? Well, as real estate magnate Donald Trump was saying for months, there never was an oil shortage. I saw him on television several times last spring and summer making the point over and over that tankers full of crude oil were sitting idle in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, creating a false shortage and driving up the prices at the wellhead and at the pumps.

Now that the need for political manipulation has passed, the prices suddenly are plummeting. Granted, part of the reason behind the sudden drop in prices may be the global economic slowdown, especially in China, but you can bet that the sudden upsurge in supply, as fake as the previous downsurge, has had a major impact too.

This is not new. It happened in the 80s when reaction to the Arab Oil Embargo a decade earlier had led to a fledgling alternative energy boom. People were experimenting with solar, hydrogen, radio waves, magnetism, electricity and more. The government was backing research and development into alternative sources.

Why do we not have energy forms today that are completely independent of the oil producing nations? Because OPEC opened up the spigot, increased production and the price of oil fell to as low as $15 per barrel.

Suddenly, alternative energy forms were far too expensive compared to oil. Our nation's leaders didn't see, or refused to acknowledge, the presence of a new form of warfare - international terrorism - and how paying out billions of American dollars to terrorist supporting nations each year was just cutting our own throat.

The ridiculously low price of foreign oil also cut and gut the domestic oil industry. Our production was shut down and capped, where it remains today. Thousands of jobs were lost, refinery expansion was halted and today we are even more dependent on foreign oil than we were a quarter century ago.

Now, in addition to being fleeced, we are being directly attacked by the very people who are getting rich off of this dependency.

But there is another angle to this that goes beyond the cost of oil production versus the cost to develop solar, hydrogen, and other energy sources.

The US Congress and the president elect are not likely to do a damn thing about our dependence on foreign oil sources because the federal government soaks up some 27 billion dollars annually from the 18.4 cent per gallon federal tax on gasoline. That is just the federal government, and just the federal tax on gasoline.

You can bail out the entire US auto industry on a year's worth of federal gasoline taxes.

Then you move to the states where the tax on a gallon of gas can stretch up to three times the federal tax. Some states, like Connecticut, not only have fixed taxes on each gallon pumped, they also charge additional taxes that are a percentage of the price per gallon, meaning the taxes increase with the increasing price of gas.

These taxes are supposed to fund highway building, maintenance and repair. They are supposed to fund mass transportation. They are supposed to come back to the consumers in better roads, more transportation options, and highway safety.

But in general, as soon as new taxes are passed by state legislatures, the same people who told their constituents they were working for improved transportation by piling on the taxes, shift the tax revenues to the general fund where those tax dollars go to pay for pet projects while the roads and infrastructure deteriorate.

The president elect campaigned on a promise of "change" in Washington. Well, actually, everybody campaigned on a promise of "change" in Washington. You know what I'd like to see for a change?

I'd like to see the president elect make good on at least one campaign promise when he takes office. I'd like to see the president elect take some of the $700 billion in bailout money and use it to support "real" alternative energy research and development, instead of repeating the same old lip service we have been hearing for decades.

We have heard that it will take 10 years to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. Nonsense. It could happen by the middle of his term of office if he applied sufficient resources to the issue.

Let's see government work for the people for a change. Let's see a politician put the country ahead of personal ambitions for a change. Let's see the big oil, big business, big deal, big shots take a back seat for a change. Let's see the United States emerge free from dependence on foreign countries when that unnecessary dependence also delivers huge profits to a handful of internationalists who derive a warped pleasure from biting the hand that feeds them.

Seeing some real patriotism and real progress in Washington, DC would be a really nice change, for a change. That would be change I could believe in.