Tuesday
I try very hard to like Barack
Obama. And sometimes he helps me out. For example, at the beginning
of his State of the Union address yesterday, he made what seemed to
me to be some sense about the budget. And he offered excellent free
advice to the GOP. Why, he asked, should we hamstring all of our
other attempts to work on the budget crisis because some of the GOP
are trying to protect the tax breaks of the very richest among us?
Why is the GOP going to the mat to defend the richest people in the
country — and he might have added, “Most of whom are liberals in
New York and L.A. and the Silicon Valley, who don’t vote Republican
anyway?”
That made sense, at least to me.
But he soon wandered off the reservation of rationality and into
two adjoining realms: the commonplace perpetual fantasies of
liberals and his own special fantasyland.
Let’s start with the worst part of the speech: the part about
what the liberals used to call global warming and now, since they
can’t back up that “global” part, call “climate change.”
Mr. Obama asked the audience, in essence, “Are you so stupid
that you think it’s just coincidence that this country had some
unusually hot years recently, and also had a big storm called
Sandy, and also had some big brush fires? Or do you agree with me
that it’s the result of a conspiracy by American industry? And
don’t you think I should bypass Congress to assault the problem
from the White House?”
Well, as a matter of fact, “NO.”
First, as to the science: for him to pick a few data points —
temperatures in the U.S., a drought, and a big storm — out of
literally trillions of data points of weather all around the globe
for all of the earth’s history, and ask us to disregard everything
but those three data points, is silly.
Yes, the USA has been warmer than usual lately, but many parts
of the earth were cooler than usual. Yes, there were some big brush
fires lately, but this is largely because of U.S. government
policies that prevent thinning of forests by cutting down dead,
tinder dry trees. Mr. Obama apparently thinks those fires were
caused by uniquely severe droughts. But there is no evidence of
that at all. We have had far drier years in many regions of this
country over the past century long ago than we have had in recent
years.
And yes, the big storm, Sandy, was a terrible storm and innocent
people suffered terribly. But we have had far worse hurricanes,
even in the northeast, within the past hundred years. A big storm
in one small region of the globe is not an unusual event, even if
that region is where Mr Obama’s most fervent media and finance
supporters live.
The unusual event is Mr. Obama taking these data points and
ignoring the other data, especially what effect on climate the
immense dumping of pollutants into the air by China, India, Brazil,
and Russia might have. Whatever changes we make in the USA will be
nothing in the global balance of pollution compared with what China
alone is forcing into our atmosphere. If we are absolutely certain
that industrial and transportation effluence should be curbed (and
I think it should, mostly for pulmonary reasons), we are just
whistling past the graveyard unless we get the BRIC countries on
track.
But what’s far worse in Mr. Obama’s contempt for the
Constitution. If Congress does not want to act on a problem, the
Constitution does not say that the legislative power defaults to
the Executive. Congress would then have spoken and Mr. Obama cannot
simply override it and the law. Mr. Obama apparently thinks he has
legislative power. He doesn’t.
Was Mr Obama really a professor of Constitutional Law or was
that just some fantasy gift title from Harvard Law School?
Mr. Obama is also living in a dream world about al Qaeda. What
on earth is he smoking to believe that al Qaeda as we knew it is
shattered? They are still powerful in Pakistan, will soon be in the
saddle again in Afghanistan, are big players in Libya, Tunisia,
Syria, and immense players in Mali. They are in Indonesia. They
were in a few caves in Afghanistan when they created the worst
civilian mass murder in U.S. history. Now they’re all over the
world and show no signs at all of going away? What is Mr Obama
talking about?
Likewise, why is he bragging about the U.S. leaving Afghanistan?
Yes, our involvement in that war will be over, I guess. But we
certainly will not be leaving with anything like a victory. It
certainly is not solely Mr. Obama’s fault that his predecessor used
up too much effort in Iraq and allowed the Taliban to regroup and
grow strong again in Afghanistan. But we are not leaving
Afghanistan in good shape at all, and the massacre of the Afghans
who believed in us will be fearful after we leave, I fear. (I hope
and pray I am wrong.)
What is Mr. Obama talking about when he says he is going to keep
the U.S. military as strong as ever when he is in the process of
deep defense cuts? I don’t blame him for those cuts: the GOP forced
this in many ways. But why would Mr Obama brag about a super
defense as he cuts defense?
Then there are his clichés: he’s going to train all of our high
school graduates so they are just as good at tech jobs as the
Germans. Hmmm. Drive by an inner city high school some day at the
close of the school day and have a look at the students and get
back to me on that one. Tell me how much they look like tech
wizards.
Then, there are his promises to use wind power to drive the U.S.
economy. Yes, it would be nice. I wrote about it and tidal power
and hot springs for Mr. Nixon when Mr. Obama was a grade school
student. It has been just a pipe dream. (Solar actually is
working.) Ditto his promises to enlarge Head Start to make our kids
better students. It’s been documented repeatedly that Head Start
has made only negligible progress in helping inner city kids to
achieve. This has been going on since the mid 1960s, and Mr. Obama
still seems to believe that it’s going to suddenly start working.
Dream world.
But the most disturbing part of the speech was about guns.
First, it’s repulsive that Mr. and Mrs. Obama have just now
discovered that inner city, largely black gangs are responsible for
a huge amount of gun deaths. The crisis has been going on for
decades and it’s horrible in their native city, Chicago. It’s been
horrible there forever. And Mr. and Mrs. Obama just noticed it in
2013 and want some praise for that? Where have they been all these
years?
But the whole subject of guns and death is being lied about by
Mr. Obama and his pals. Two thirds of U.S. gun deaths are from
suicide. (Why don’t they work on that one? Suicide is highly
preventable by a belief in God.) Of the one third that’s left, less
than eight percent is from any form of long gun: semi-automatic,
rifle, shotgun. If there is an epidemic of gun violence at schools
— and there is and it’s terrible — why do we punish the hunter in
Montana or the gun collector in Idaho who have never done anything
even slightly illegal with their guns? Why are we even thinking of
punishing people who have done absolutely nothing wrong for the
crimes of people thousands of miles away?
And in that same vein, if there are, say, a hundred or two
hundred gun deaths a year from semi-automatic weapons, that’s too
many. Any is too many. But the real slaughter of the innocent in
this country is from abortion — not from guns, not in America. Add
it up: a few hundred from semi-automatic rifles — roughly a
million from abortion. What are we talking about here? Why all the
cheering about taking guns away from people and not a syllable
about abortion?
And to jump back, why, if a gaggle of genuinely crazy people
kill children in one region of America, would we take that out on
sane people somewhere else?
I could go on forever. Job retraining? Rarely works. Making
banks lend to people they don’t want to lend to? Didn’t that sort
of thinking get us into trouble in the first place? Raising the
minimum wage? Fine by me, but it hurts kids who need an
after-school job. All standard liberal pabulum. Now, that I think
about it, standard Presidential pabulum. I try to like Mr. Obama
but he does not help me.
Oh, well, what does he care? He has the Beautiful People on his
side. I have Julie Goodgirl. And I have to swim now. Enough
thinking for one night.
