You can’t say we weren’t warned ahead of time about Obama’s
globalist and controlling tendencies.
As candidate Obama explained in a campaign speech in
Portland on May 18, 2008, it would be tough for him to get
together with the world’s leaders and establish international
controls on human behavior if we continue to carry on with our
individualistic hankerings to eat cheeseburgers and drive things
that are twice as big as the SmartCar.
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and
keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times and then just expect
that other countries are going to say okay,” he proclaimed.
“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”
By Obama’s definition of U.S. “leadership,” we get a seat
at the table with the world planners if we bow to their demands
in terms of what we buy and how we live, if we downsize in
accordance with their centralized planning, if we admit our
gluttonous faults and send reparations for all the effluence and
global warming that our materialistic successes have caused over
the past century.
At the White House, however, it’s a different picture.
Instead of guilt, global consciousness, and keeping the
thermostat at an earth-friendly 60 degrees, it seems that Obama
likes it hot at the Executive Mansion.
“The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first
full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in
the Oval Office without his suit jacket,” reported the New
York Times on January 29. “There was, however,
a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked
up the thermostat.”
”He’s from Hawaii, OK?” explained Mr. Obama’s
senior advisor, David Axelrod. “He likes it warm. You could grow
orchids in there.”
Al Gore should calculate how many extra polar bears are
likely to drown if Obama keeps it hot enough for four years to
grow orchids in all 132 rooms of the White House, plus the 35
bathrooms.
It’s the same with food. We’re supposed to cut back while
Obama is jetting in Wagyu steaks from Japan. The good stuff, the
result of cattle bred for generations to be genetically
predisposed to intense marbling, goes for $300 a pound.
For the accompanying vegetable, the First Lady has a knack
for simultaneously maximizing her carbon footprint while picking
out the perfect bunch of politically correct kale.
Washington
Post columnist Dana Milbank described one such
trip:
Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay
that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to
do? Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament
Thursday afternoon:
The Secret Service and the D.C. police
brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont
Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson
Square Metro station. They swept the area in front of the
Department of Veterans Affairs with bomb-sniffing dogs and
installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up
barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with
binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a
block or so from the White House, the First Lady hopped into
her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail
of sirens.
The whole thing reminds me of when Forbes
ranked the allegedly egalitarian Fidel Castro well above
Queen Elizabeth in personal wealth. Castro responded by
threatening a lawsuit.
