Drill baby drill

I used to see a black Hummer driving around town, complete with a "Drill, baby drill" bumper sticker.

What a fabulous slogan.

Slogans are fabulous when they use few words (two! one used twice) to unite, energize and signify a tribe. You're either an insider or an outsider, but there were no fence sitters on this one. The slogan captured a can-do, engineering-centric, please-get-out-of-my-way, anti-intellectual, regulate-industry-less mindset that this driver (and presumably others in his tribe) could broadcast and be motivated by. In three words! A key part of the slogan is the extraneous word 'baby', which reinforces the informality, the certainty and the impatience with bureaucracy. Support it or not, you have to agree that it was a great slogan. (Until it wasn't).

Like most good political slogans, it called for something to happen in the future, something someone else would do and be responsible for, nothing that could come home to roost in a really short time. Of course, few could predict how close the future actually was. Ideally, next time you'd pick a slogan that had a much longer expiration date.