An "On the Road" travelogue from "Outside the Beltway" to "Inside the Beltway."

December 21, 2005 -- An "On the Road" travelogue from "Outside the Beltway" to "Inside the Beltway." This editor has been making the grueling trip down Interstate-95 to Florida since 1975. A few days before Christmas, one could always expect the same scenario: heavy traffic with cars sporting license plates from New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia to New Hampshire, Maine, Ontario, Quebec, and even small Prince Edward Island; no vacancies at highway motels for those without reservations, jammed fast food restaurants and rest areas, huge motor homes and pick-ups hauling trailers vying with semi trucks to dominate the highway. Not this year.

The Bush administration is touting an "improving economy." That is not the case from the vantage point of I-95. The booming economy is just another Bush lie from what can be observed today Interstate-side in Walterboro, South Carolina.

A booming economy? Not from the vantage point of one of the most heavily traveled routes during the holidays.

With gas prices between $2.21 and $2.35 per gallon, missing from I-95 this year are all the northern license plates (the Canadians appear to be eschewing "Bush Amerika" in droves) the abundance of motor homes and trailers, the packed motels (most are at between 25 and 40 percent occupancy), long lines at gas stations, jammed restaurants, and full parking lots at the numerous factory outlet malls that are found throughout the Carolinas. Even the ultimate in kitsch, a tourist trap called "South of the Border" on the North Carolina-South Carolina border, was largely deserted. I was the sole person sitting in one fast food restaurant in North Carolina yesterday afternoon.


I-95 Christmas 2005: this "border" is largely deserted this year

In the heart of "Red State America," Bush is paying back his base by strangling the economy with an expensive and unpopular war and price gouging at the gas pumps. That hurts the small town economies that depend on the annual Northeast-Florida holiday traffic flow.

The radio air waves in this part of the country are replete with right-wing blatherers, from Rush Limbaugh to local mentally-deficient "Rush wanabees." Perhaps if the people in this part of the country would turn off their radios and drive over to the interstates, they will see the true results of Bush's economy. They don't need the Limbaughs of the world to tell them what is happening in their own neighborhoods.