Sometimes, it's more than just funny

A week or so back, I was watching Senator McCain soft-shoe his way through the softball Q&A he calls a Town Hall Meeting. Along with the usual marshmallows, and the wonderful sidesteps when a questioner went off script, there was one question that actually gave the G.O.P. standardbearer a moment of pause.

We import oil from many places. Some of them are our friends, some are not. If we were to increase purchases from the people we like and reduce purchases from the people we don't like, it might help. So could you tell us which nations you would buy more from and which ones you would buy less from?

It took about eight beats until Senator McCain could start grinding out the double-shuffle about how he would not presume to tell the American people how they should feel about other nations, and then tossed out the usual "Me.....Good. Obama.......Bad" closer and repeating the fascinating (in it's earliest meaning) theory that Obama, if elected four years ago, would by now have gas prices into double digits through losing the Iraq War.

Since Senator McCain seems to have accepted the premise of the question, why is it that nobody has suggested percentage changes as a carrot-and-stick tool in foreign policy? Granted, some balances are out of even Mr McCain's control; for example, our second largest supplier, Mexico, is running low in current supplies, and our largest supplier, Canada, is going to be increasing output anyway, but why not? If the whole idea is to get out from under Middle Eastern Oil, why not just increase our purchases from our top four suppliers, and further decrease what we buy from the Middle East as we reduce demand?