Maureen Dowd reports:

The General Accounting Office issued a report last week noting that the vice president shaped our energy policy with clandestine advice from “petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, electricity industry representatives and lobbyists.”

Favoritism to energy pals led to last week’s insane decision to gut part of the Clean Air Act and allow power plants, refineries and other industrial sites to belch pollutants.

Another Bush-Cheney energy crony is Anthony Alexander of Ohio’s FirstEnergy Corporation, which helped trigger the blackout after failing to upgrade its transmission system properly since deregulation. He was a Bush Pioneer, having raised at least $100,000 for the campaign.

This logrolling attitude has led to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allowing Halliburton ? which made Mr. Cheney a rich man with $20 million worth of cashed-in stock ? to get no-bid contracts in Iraq totaling $1.7 billion, and that’s just a start.

All this, and high gas prices, too?

Whether you like Maureen or you don’t like Maureen, she’s not the government’s own General Accounting Office and she doesn’t do anything that can impact prices at the pump.

When will people snap out of this trance and begin to ask themselves why there is less money, why less jobs, why more fear and why higher prices?

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again: When Republicans mess up, the American public gets screwed; when Democrats mess up, only interns do.