THERE IS NOTHING quite as effective as $40 oil to turn merely silly politicians into, er, dissemblers. This past weekend Europe’s finance ministers and others, all of whom take a lot more out of their motorists’ pockets in the form of gasoline taxes than the OPEC oil cartel can ever dream of doing, used a G7 pre-summit meeting in New York to demand that producing nations step up output so as to ease motorists’ burdens. Not to be outdone in the oil fantasy league, the producing nations also met to plan to raise the output quotas that they are already exceeding, even though only Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in any position to step up production significantly.

Meanwhile, John Kerry, who admitted to owning a gas-guzzling SUV only after prodding, is accusing President Bush of keeping prices high by refusing to draw down, or at least stop topping off, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Never mind that when Bill Clinton tried to use sales from the Reserve to bring down gasoline prices, he succeeded, if at all, only to the tune of one cent per gallon. Or that the amount of oil going into the SPR amounts to a mere 0.2 percent of world supply, hardly enough to move prices. Or that a good portion of the responsibility for high gasoline prices rests with Democrats and their green allies who have made it virtually impossible to construct refineries in the United States, and have limited the oil industry’s flexibility by requiring that different grades of gasoline be used in different cities, depending on local air quality requirements.