The World Needs More Ninjas

If you’re not familiar with Andrew Sullivan, he’s generally a pretty interesting writer, though, sometimes, he tends to get a bit too emotional and/or overly focused on a topic. Now, he’s singling out SUV users as those who help fund terrorists. OK, yea people need to use common sense in buying a car. You don’t need a Hummer to drive around town. If you rarely ever have passengers, you probably don’t need a Ford Excursion.

But, I think it’s a bit naive to just single out SUV drivers as a whole. Look at this survey of the gas mileage for 2005 vehicles. Yea, there’s some ridiculously low MPG SUVs, but look at the sports cars…carrying a family of four around in a Toyota RAV4 is a lot less damaging than cruising in a Dodge Viper or Ford Thunderbird. And, look at vans, minivans, full-size trucks, the ultra-expensive cars, Cadillac Devilles, Ford Crown Vics. There’s quite a few SUVs that get better mileage than most of these. There’s no doubt that a comprehensive energy policy is necessary to address the US dependency on foreign oil, but randomly singling out SUV drivers as the culprits of this “terrorist funding” is just people looking for an easy target to blame. And, just for the record, this comes from someone who drives a Honda Civic .