Republicans already are trying to confer "ownership" of the economic recession on President Obama. They suddenly have forgotten that their last president inherited a (much milder) downturn back in 2001 and never really did come to grips with it, instead turning his back and whistling a happy tune while robber barons stole the country blind.

I'm standing back watching Obama with all possible fingers and toes crossed, because I'm not real convinced that the standard treatment, when applied to today's conditions, is really what the doctor intended to order. Today's editorial echoes these lines to an extent, but bear with me, we're traveling different forks of the great big economic road.

The country, led boldly by President Obama, is piling debt upon debt upon yet new debt. At least he's keeping the tax base solid, but we can't keep going this way forever. Down the line, all those IOUs we're accumulating will not be redeemable for Green Stamps. Someone's going to have to pay something with a passing resemblance to real money for all that debt, sooner or later.

The president says he has everything under control. Then again, President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq in 2003. Gotta be careful with these politicians.

Compounding the problem is the national economy badly needs a strong dose of spending. The world doesn't. The world is starting to flirt with the "peak resources" phenomenon. We hear mostly about "peak oil," the idea that we've used up more than half the oil that exists. Finding new sources of oil will be more expensive in the future, the oil we find will be harder and more expensive to retrieve and the getting the oil that's still in the ground is going to be more environmentally damaging in more than one way.

But that's just the beginning. We've been extracting raw resources from the ground for going on 5,000 years, although it's only in the past 100 or so years that people have really begun to do serious-style rape and pillage of the environment. What's worse is that all the "uh-oh's" in our energy future are going to start turning in on each other: Trying to fix Problem A is going to have the probable result of making Problem B worse, and in the meantime Problem C just turned up and it looks worse than the other two put together. These are going to be the kind of juggler's balls we're going to be dealing with in coming years.

One gets the impression that the president really gets it, on this topic, at least, but the Congress is lagging way behind. Congressmen listen carefully to those who write them large checks, and we are still at the point where these check writers are saying, "Give me mine."

That's what has to stop. Everyone needs to step back and try looking at a few Big Pictures. Just as an aside, in many areas, including the environment, the president so far is talking a better game than he plays. It's still early yet, but it's time to get serious.

It's hard for Republicans at the moment because they're the Outs, and they'd rather get back to being the Ins before they worry about big pictures. Plus, they're more skeptical than Democrats of the things like Peak Oil and global warming that are sending civilization some not-too-subtle hints that tomorrow is not going to be like yesterday. But Republicans managed to soil their own nest so thoroughly during the last half of the Bush administration that it's going to be a little while before they are going to be able to return to their Golden Days of 2002-08, when they had the whip hand in all three branches of government.