Send me a postcard.(but enough about you)(John McCain's energy policy; nuclear energy)

MY little Republican heart went pit-a-pat the other day when I saw the headline in the Times: MCCAIN SETS GOAL OF 45 NEW NUCLEAR REACTORS BY 2030. I'm all for nukes in any form. I've long felt that nuclear energy is the way to go, and now that I read that France and Belgium get three-quarters of their electricity from nuclear energy, I feel it's a matter of national pride. I can understand their superiority in cheese and ales, but things have come to a pretty poor pass when we have to catch up to France and Belgium on energy policy.

I once put the direct question to Al Gore, after a screening of his quite good movie An Inconvenient Truth (please hold off throwing tomatoes; go easy, this is my first column for NR): "Are you in favor of nuclear energy?" Simple enough, right? His answer went on for five minutes. It was a masterpiece of equivocation, a veritable multi-armed Shiva goddess of on-the-one-hands, on-the-other-hands. The next day, I got an e-mail from Jeffrey Toobin, who was also in the crowd: "I now know less about his views on nuclear energy than I did before." The Greenies, of whom Mr. Gore is the undisputed Jolly Giant, just can't get their tree-hugging arms around those Three Mile Island towers. (Architecturally, quite splendid, I always thought.) I'll bet a month's Netflix membership fees The China Syndrome is at the top of their rental queues.

But after my initial gladsome tachycardia over McCain's embrace of Our Friend the Atom, my BP reverted to normal sinus rhythm. Perhaps I've been living in this whited sepulchre on the Potomac too long (1981; Barack was 20), but whenever I see that coy little preposition "by" slipping political lips during a presidential campaign, my inner skeptic goes, Yeah, well, send me a postcard when you get there.

Remember those wonderful Soviet Five Year Plans? Nothing so warmed the cockles of a Leninist heart as to hear some ursine member of the Central Committee, lavishly be-bedecked with multiple Hero of Soviet Labor medals, thumping the podium and declaring--without fear of contradiction, thanks to Vladimir Putin's former employers down at the Lubyanka--that wheat output in Ukraine will quadruple over the next five years!

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Applause! Yay, Lenin! Yay, Stalin! Whoopee! You guys totally rock! Say, do you think we could have another pair of Bulgarian sandals? It's been twenty years since that last shipment came in, and these are ...