Then Caroline Glick writes about Shimon Peres' retirement and says many of the very things I too have thought.
I attended Pres George Bush's 75th birthday party in Houston with my son and we were at the ball park and there was Peres sitting with Bush in his box. Peres was the only international person attending as far as I could tell. I said to my son, I believe Peres enjoys the limelight too much.
But if truth be known I am jealous because, I would have loved to have Sharon Stone attend my 80th birthday (see photo below) but then I did not invite her because I did not think she would come and I did not know her address either. (See 1a below.)
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More on the Bergdahl matter (See 2 below.)
Obama and his lost MOJO! (See 2a below.)
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Is the Q.E bomb The Fed constructed more dangerous than potential ones from Jihadists? Two thoughts. (See 3 below.)
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Obama acts boldly, because he has a cell phone and a pen, to further cripple our economy?
Is he more interested in some questionable legacy than American employment?
Pollution is a problem, but radical solutions that will produce serious cost burdens for lower socio economic sector as well as the middle class is also probably not the best way to go but then 'what difference does it make' for a resident driven by arrogance and disregard for the impact of his decision making since everything he does is about politics and legacy. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
A few years ago, the terrorist organization Hamas, decided to send a giftto the President of Israel . They sent him an elaborate box with a note ..The President opened the box and saw that the content was feces(shit,merde).
He opened the note which said “ For you and the proud people of Israel”.Since the President of Israel, Mr Shimon Peres is a wise and experienced person he decided to reciprocate and he sent to Hamas a very nice parcel and a note.
The leaders of Hamas were very surprised to receive the parcel and opened it very carefully suspecting that it might contain a bomb.
After opening they discovered that it contained a small “chip” that was rechargable by solar energy with 1800 Terabyte memory and a3D hologram display capable of functioning in any type of cellular phone or Tablet or laptop. In other words the most advanced technologicalinvention and development made in Israel.
The Hamas leaders were very impressed and read the note which said“ Every leader gives the best his people can produce “
1a) Shimon Peres' legacy
By CarolineGlick
On June 10, the Knesset will elect President Shimon Peres’s successor. As he departs the President’s Residence at the end of June, the media will provide saturation coverage of his final days and tell us over and over that Peres is the greatest statesman in Jewish history. His personal gravitas is Israel’s single most important asset in the world, they will say as they warn of our bleak future without him.
The upcoming Peres-is-a-Superhero festival will just be the latest of the narcissistic, tasteless celebrations of this man, always choreographed expertly by Peres and his retinue of media groupies.
Like his 80th and 85th birthdays, Peres’s 90th birthday celebration went on for a month. As the serving president, his last two monthlong benders cost the taxpayers millions of shekels and broke the budget of the President’s Residence. All were replete with international celebrity guests like Nelson Mandela, Bono and Bill Clinton whom the press drooled over.
Hyperventilating reporters paused between drinks to mournfully note that after Peres leaves office, the parties will end and the A-listers will stop visiting.
And that’s the problem with Peres’s showboating. It’s always been all about him, never about us.
Peres’s popularity among the jet-setters never translates into international support for the State of Israel. Israel is but a prop for him – a means of securing the continued support of the beautiful people.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Peres’s international popularity has always grown in indirect proportion to Israel’s. The more Hollywood stars he adds to his collection, the worse Israel’s international isolation.
This makes sense. Ever since Peres became the architect of the phony peace process with the PLO in 1993, the world outside has used its embrace of him as a means of hiding its hostility to Israel.
Governments that adopt anti-Israel positions, and individuals who condemn us regularly, use Peres, whom they lionize as Israel’s “elder statesman,” to falsely represent their hostile behavior as proof of friendship.
Hence the likes of Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan could show up at Peres’s birthday parties, get their pictures taken with him, and then turn around and bash Israel as the chief obstruction to peace in the Middle East.
Hence Yasser Arafat could “show his commitment to peace” by meeting with Peres hours after his henchmen carried out heinous crimes, like the lynch of IDF reservists in Ramallah in 2000, or the massacre of Israeli teenagers at the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv in 2001, and so deny the government the ability to retaliate.
Peres is beloved by the media and the rest of the leftist elites, and despised by much of the public, for his role in engineering the fake peace process with the PLO.
Some 1,500 Israelis lost their lives because of his initiative. Israel’s international standing, which was reaching new heights with the end of the Cold War, has in the intervening years plummeted to previously unknown depths.
Peres sent his emissaries to Oslo to negotiate with senior PLO terrorists in breach of Israeli law, and without the knowledge, let alone the authorization, of his boss, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was arguably the worst strategic blunder in Jewish history.
Yet, as he exits the President’s Residence, embracing the PLO will not be the worst or the most catastrophic mistake of his career.
In the fullness of time, compared to his latest debacle, Peres’s initiation and maintenance of the Oslo process will be but a footnote in his career as Israel’s most illustrious subversive.
Peres’s most significant legacy will be the nuclear arsenal he leaves behind.
No, not Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal that Peres’s flaks eagerly claim he is solely responsible for developing.
Peres’s legacy will be Iran’s nuclear arsenal.
For years, many Israelis as well as Israel’s supporters in the US, the Sunni Arab states in the Persian Gulf and even the French have been scratching their heads wondering why Israel hasn’t struck Iran’s nuclear installations yet. Over the past few months, we received our answer.
The ongoing police investigation into allegedly illegal conduct by then-IDF Chief of Staff Lt.- Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi has revealed the source of Israel’s paralysis.
Apparently led by Peres, the triumvirate of security chiefs serving between 2008 and 2011 – Ashkenazi, then-Mossad director Meir Dagan and then-Shin Bet director Avi Dichter – colluded to undermine Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s and then-defense minister Ehud Barak’s legal authority to order Israel’s security forces to take action against Iran.
According to a Haaretz report on Wednesday, between 2008 and 2011, the four men leaked plans and discussions of possible Israeli strikes on Iran to the media in order to prevent them from being carried out. The four men opposed an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations and stridently rejected any Israeli operation not coordinated with the US.
Ashkenazi and his associates are being investigated by the police for crimes associated with criminal insubordination to Israel’s elected leadership. Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein ordered the police probe in January after information unearthed by the media and by the State Comptroller’s Office raised strong suspicions of a conspiracy led by Ashkenazi to usurp the powers of the government.
According to media reports of the investigation, the police have discovered tape recordings of numerous telephone conversations between Ashkenazi and Peres. According to Channel 1 and Haaretz, Peres’s attorney requested that Weinstein prohibit the publication of the details of phone conversations.
Haaretz’s report didn’t specifically state that the conversations in question related to actions by Peres and the security chiefs to prevent military operations against Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But the same day the report appeared, Amir Oren, Haaretz’s senior commentator, published an article praising Peres for preventing Israel from attacking Iran.
Oren wrote, “Peres’s involvement in blocking the Iranian adventure [i.e., a military attack against Iran’s nuclear installations] is… the most important action he took as president.”
As Amnon Lord wrote last December in Makor Rishon, Peres’s role in the security chiefs’ conspiracy to prevent Netanyahu and Barak from ordering a strike against Iran’s nuclear installations was to provide “pseudo-constitutional and pseudo- moral support” for their unlawful subversion.
The four men were very likely not acting by themselves. Lord argued that the Obama administration was a fifth partner in this criminal conspiracy.
The four men were very likely not acting by themselves. Lord argued that the Obama administration was a fifth partner in this criminal conspiracy.
The US was represented in its efforts by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen. Mullen visited Israel almost every month during this period and constantly praised Ashkenazi’s leadership publicly.
As Lord noted, these trips were reciprocated by Ashkenazi and then-Military Intelligence commander Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin who flew regularly to Washington.
For the Americans, Lord wrote, the point of cultivating these ties was “to influence the IDF’s high command and cut it off from the political leadership of Israel.”
In the case of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, as in the case of the phony peace process, Peres’s motivation, like that of Ashkenazi, Dichter and Dagan, was clear and crass. He wanted power.
The facts already established by the Ashkenazi et. al. conspiracy probe reveal that from his earliest days as chief of staff, Ashkenazi was preparing the ground for a post-IDF run for prime minister. His will to rule distorted his perception of his place in the chain of command. Instead of viewing Netanyahu and Barak as his commanders, as the law stipulates, he saw them as his political rivals, and behaved accordingly.
As for Peres, he had been searching for a leftist politician who could defeat Netanyahu. Ashkenazi was his knight in shining armor.
This is why Peres launched a public campaign after Ashkenazi retired in 2011 to give Ashkenazi immunity from the law requiring military personnel to wait a year between their retirement from the service and their entrance into politics.
Leaking top secret information about internal discussions and plans related to military attacks on Iran is a treasonous act. If, as seems likely, the probe reveals collusion between the four men and the Obama administration, that would represent another act of treason.
But leaving treason aside, the questions still arises: How could these men, who were charged with protecting the state from its enemies, act as they did? There are plenty of ways to gain political power. Why would they try to advance their political fortunes by undermining Israel’s ability to prevent Iran – which has made our annihilation its declared goal – from acquiring nuclear weapons?
The tragedy of Israel is that under the guidance of narcissists like Peres, Israel’s elites have over time adopted his overweening sense of entitlement and his puerile view of the world. Encouraged by Peres and others like him, men like Ashkenazi, Diskin and Dagan view Netanyahu as a usurper. He comes from the wrong side of the ideological and social tracks.
By daring to get elected and reelected, Netanyahu, they believe, is taking away what is rightfully theirs. And so, as they see it, he deserves no respect. Their job as public servants is to either topple his government or make it impossible for him to govern, or both.
This sense of entitlement is made worse by a provincial and childlike view of the world where actions have no consequences, threats are in our heads, and lunch is always free.
Peres and the security brass have repeatedly argued that Iran’s nuclear program is a US problem, not an Israeli one, and that Israel can trust President Barack Obama to take care of it for us.
It doesn’t matter to them that Obama has made clear by word and deed that Israel cannot trust him on Iran. The same men who think the worst of Netanyahu and will stop at nothing to prevent him from making the decisions for which he was elected, take everything Obama and his advisers say at face value.
In Peres’s case, he’s been pretending away the consequences of his own actions for 20 years. His narcissistic, sociopathic view of the world has blinded him to the devastating outcome of his embrace of the PLO. And now that it is obvious that the US will do nothing to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power, Peres behaves as though there is no cause for concern.
In his meeting earlier this month with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Peres scoffed at the mounting danger of a nuclear Iran with his signature inanity, saying, “President Obama said the US shouldn’t be the policemen of the world and I agree. The US should be the peacemaker of the world.”
This sort of self-indulgent gibberish is devastating for the country. Now, as Iran’s nuclear advance appears all but unstoppable, Israel requires sober-minded leaders who measure their success by how their actions benefit Israel. If Peres really does exit the scene at the end of next month, perhaps we will finally get them.
2) Covering the Controversy of a Swap and the Relentless Drive to Bring Americans Home
By Bridget Johnson
Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s release from the Taliban over the weekend brought immeasurable relief to his family and friends, sparked heated debate on Capitol Hill, and also launched a mini Internet storm about the Yellow Ribbon Project’s coverage of the case.
There are many questions surrounding Bergdahl’s captivity, and many allegations raised by fellow soldiers since he was returned about the circumstances under which he disappeared from his post and the deaths of soldiers involved in efforts to locate him. These will and should be investigated. The Associated Pressrevealed today that a 2010 Pentagon investigation found Bergdahl walked away from his unit. Army Secretary John McHugh said in a statement today that they want to ensure Bergdahl is on the road to recovery before beginning their investigation in earnest. “As Chairman Dempsey indicated, the Army will then review this in a comprehensive, coordinated effort that will include speaking with Sgt. Bergdahl to better learn from him the circumstances of his disappearance and captivity,” McHugh said. “All other decisions will be made thereafter, and in accordance with appropriate regulations, policies and practices.”
There are additional questions about the timing and circumstances of the swap. Congressional sources working on the case indicated to PJM last month that there were missed opportunities to get Bergdahl back, particularly hampered by the fact that for the majority of his captivity government agencies were not working in tandem, a malady addressed when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel named a Pentagon overseer to the case in February. This increased the importance of Bergdahl’s case from the standpoint of how the government is equipped to juggle potential POW/MIA cases beyond the Army sergeant.
There are questions about Bob Bergdahl, the father who grew out his beard, spoke in Pashto and tweeted to his son’s captors. I prefer, though, not to judge a desperate family who tried in a multitude of ways to appeal to his captors to release the son they hadn’t seen in five years.
And it was my retweet of one of Bob Bergdahl’s tweets in January that sparked half of the Internet ire today:
One of the tragic things about the Bergdahl tweet was the fact that it shouldn’t take a White House petition for the family of any captive or missing American to get the administration’s attention. It’s not, however, uncommon for these families to suffer the fate of disappearing in the headlines and sinking fast on the list of administration and Capitol Hill priorities. I chose to highlight the fact the Bergdahl family was going through this, and encouraged retweets of my retweet to raise awareness.The petition stressed the use of force, along with “all means available,” to secure Bergdahl’s rescue or release. I didn’t sign it myself; I’ve never signed a White House petition. I wrote a news article on the petition, touching on the White House reaction regarding the Taliban’s proposed swap deal to get Bergdahl back, and included a link at the end in case readers wanted to add their names to the petition; you don’t write a story on a petition without including how readers can find it. The choice was there for readers if they wanted to add their names or not.
The second half of the Internet ire asserted that I then proved hypocritical because of tweets questioning the strategy of the prisoner swap, thus going against the “all means available” part of the petition that was the subject of my news article and Bob Bergdahl’s tweet. The argument centered around one tweet, in which I noted Israel’s prisoner swaps haven’t done much to increase their security. The Jewish State has a steadfast edict of not leaving any soldier behind, even if it’s trading a thousand Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit. As these trades stoke debate in the Knesset and cabinet in Jerusalem every time, these are never easy decisions. The nearly uniform reaction from Congress, from many Democrats as well as Republicans, mirrors this sentiment: We’re happy that he’s free, but we’re disturbed about how it happened. Lawmakers need to know more, as does the public.
And that reaction is what I spent much of the weekend rounding up. My tweets of lawmakers’ reactions or the Taliban reaction to the swap, as well as the administration’s defense, went to corresponding news stories. There is and will continue to be serious dissension about both the details of the swap and how it happened, and we’ll know a lot more when congressional hearings get under way. There’s also concern in Afghanistan, as reflected bytheir media, highlighting the regional and potentially global implications of the swap strategy as it played out in this case. This will and should be studied in the months to come.
What this debate should not do is pull any focus away from other Americans being held abroad. Whether it’sWarren Weinstein in the hands of al-Qaeda, Bob Levinson, Amir Hekmati and Saeed Abedini in the hands of Iran,Alan Gross in Cuba or Kenneth Bae in North Korea, there are Americans whose health problems are multiplying as they wait for release or rescue. I highlighted how Hekmati, a Marine veteran, told Secretary of State John Kerry in September that despite the hardships he’s suffered for more than 1,000 days in Evin prison he would not want to be released as part of a trade with Tehran. The debate over the next several months shouldn’t just be about what did or didn’t go wrong in the Bergdahl case, but what we can do to look forward and bring other Americans home as well.
2a) How Obama Lost His Mojo
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. One pen-and-phone executive action driving the stubborn VA scandal out of the limelight, welcoming home an American held captive by our enemies. The vanquisher of Osama bin Laden now bringing home the last prisoner of war. The optics would be great: sharing the Rose Garden spotlight with grateful parents, and a hero’s welcome from small town, USA in rustic Idaho. And as a bonus, Gitmo would get 5 very troublesome inmates closer to empty. He would cap the week in which he announced the pullout from Afghanistan with a triumphal return.
But the exchange of Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban kingpins hasn’t worked out as planned. A firestorm of criticism has erupted, with Bergdahl’s former comrades in arms proclaiming him a deserter, Congress upset that it was not informed of the transfer of Gitmo prisoners as required by a law Obama himself signed, and Susan Rice once again playing the role of Sunday show stand up gal, maintaining Bergdahl served with “honor and distinction,” only to have a court martial for desertion come into discussion at the highest level of the military.
How could the president, proclaimed by presidential historian Michael Beschlossthe smartest man with the highest IQ ever elected to the presidency, misread the situation so badly? Several reasons suggest themselves.
Media ennui
Following the Friday announcement of the return of Sgt. Bergdahl, the dominant narrative in the media was one of joy, in keeping with hopes of the president. But in the face of objections from military figures, in particular social media posts from those personally familiar with the circumstances of his departure from his duty post, media allies could not maintain their customary cofferdam around information damaging to the president’s narrative.
VA scandal damage
The VA scandal outraged both sides of the aisle. Veteran and active duty troops are a sacred cause to the vast majority of Americans. The fact those who sacrificed so
much are now suffering and dying thanks to administrative inaction (at best) or incompetence and indifference (less charitably), has established the notion that the Obama administration may not be on the side of the soldiers as a dark suspicion in many minds. The military enjoys far more respect from the public than either politicians or the media. Obama has slashed military spending, and has referred to corpsmen as “corpsemen,” demonstrating a lack of familiarity, indeed a remoteness from military life. When he gave a commencement speech at West Point last week, it was apparent the feeling was mutual. The reception he received was “icy” according to CNN. a
much are now suffering and dying thanks to administrative inaction (at best) or incompetence and indifference (less charitably), has established the notion that the Obama administration may not be on the side of the soldiers as a dark suspicion in many minds. The military enjoys far more respect from the public than either politicians or the media. Obama has slashed military spending, and has referred to corpsmen as “corpsemen,” demonstrating a lack of familiarity, indeed a remoteness from military life. When he gave a commencement speech at West Point last week, it was apparent the feeling was mutual. The reception he received was “icy” according to CNN. a
The pants on fire problem
The great lies of Obamacare -- “If you like your insurance, you can keep it. If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period.” -- have seriously and permanently damaged not just President Obama’s credibility, but the bond of trust between an American president and his citizenry. It is now perfectly respectable to by somewhat distrustful of the president, and suspicious of his motives. This seriously aggravates the media ennui mentioned above. Even the truest of true believers must wonder if they are gaining traction.
Executive isolation
The president apparently bypassed not just Congress but also the intelligence agency vetting process that could have warned him of the risks he faced by returning the Taliban war criminals, and the significant liabilities Sgt. Bergdahl’s departure from his duty post and the subsequent deaths of those sent to bring him back created for the heroic and triumphant narrative Obama sought.
We know very little about the actual decision-making process used in formulating this trade. But we do know that the president likes and trusts a small circle of people, including his aide Valerie Jarrett, who wields enormous influence, and who told Obama biographer David Remnick:
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
Advisers with such elevated opinions of the president are unlikely to offer hard counsel, and more likely to reinforce his own instincts. As Obama once admitted, “I actually believe my own bullshit.”
Momentum
It may be intangible, but momentum is a very real factor in politics, as in sports. Second terms are notoriously difficult for presidents, but President Obama may be having the hardest time since Nixon (and we know how that ended). For a variety of reasons, including a media which, if no longer enthusiastic, is not hostile the way Nixon’s media were, and his status as a historic first, President Obama is unlikely to face Nixon’s fate.
But so far, the incumbent President of the United States has not demonstrated a great capacity to learn from his mistakes. If the November elections show fellow Democrats that he has become a liability to their own political futures, his current difficulties may look like the good old days.
Note: reference to a West Point cadet failing to salute has been deleted. I was mistaken, fooled by an optical illusion.
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3) Texas Professor Robert Auerbach: Fed Has Built $2.58 Trillion 'Bomb' With Excess Reserves
By Dan Weil
The Federal Reserve's massive easing program has led to an accumulation of $2.58 trillion of excess bank reserves, and that's a ticking time bomb, says Robert Auerbach, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas.
"It will be six years in October 2014 that Federal Reserve officials started building the monetary bomb," he writes on The Huffington Post.
"Now that the bomb has reached $2.58 trillion, some reporters and broadcasters have found a problem. Fed officials are now talking about plans to dismantle the bomb with no troublesome side-effects. Some of their announced plans are ineffectual, harmful and ridiculous."
The problem started in 2008, when the Fed decided to pay interest on banks' excess reserves, Auerbach says. "Paying banks to hold excess reserves instead of using the money to make loans to businesses and consumers increased unemployment."
That interest rate is 0.25 percent. It should be cut to zero, Auerbach says. "The Fed must then start selling the securities it has bought from the public before the $2.58 trillion bomb explodes with trillions of dollars flowing into the non-bank private sector."
Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, says the Fed will ultimately reverse the tapering of its bond purchases.
"If the Fed actually did what it's threatening to do, completely remove all the monetary props beneath the [stock] market, to wind down QE [quantitative easing] to zero and eventually begin to increase interest rates, then I think the market will head substantially lower," he told Yahoo.
"But I don't believe they'll do that. I still think the Fed is going to end up aborting the taper."
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By ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to enact sweeping new regulations that will transform the U.S. economy by essentially putting hundreds of coal-fired power plants on the road to extinction, President Obama is finally making good on his famous campaign promise that his election would signal “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.” The goal of the new regulations that bypass Congress is to reduce power plant carbon emissions by 30 percent by the year 2030. But in order to do that, hundreds of the more than 600 coal-burning plants will have to close. Though it is impossible to say with any certainty how much damage this will do to the U.S. economy, what Obama is doing with a stroke of a pen will turn the energy industry upside down, send energy prices skyrocketing, and likely send those regions of the country that are dependent on either the coal industry or the plants that use the stuff into crisis.
Though EPA chief Gina McCarthy claimed that the move would actually help the economy and emphasized the plan’s flexibility, that’s the sort of usual empty “green jobs” rhetoric that no one, even on the left, believes anymore. While the more the president wraps himself and his party in the environmentalist flag the better his liberal base and young voters–who have been indoctrinated in the catechism of global warming throughout their education–will feel, Democrats will pay a price for this piece of ideological governance. Embattled red state incumbents may seek to distance themselves from the president, as will Democrat Senate challengers like Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes. But the White House clearly regards Grimes and others like her as falling into the same category as the large numbers of jobs that will be lost by this decision. They are acceptable collateral damage that can be lived with because the main goal here is to burnish the president’s legacy as a leader who took serious steps to stop the warming of the planet.
Liberals are celebrating the decision both for its supposed benefits on climate change and for the sheer exercise of executive power to achieve liberal ends, but even one of the president’s leading cheerleaders admitted that what happened today won’t really do much to fix the environment. As the New York Times reports:
On Monday, Mr. Obama is bypassing Congress and taking one of the biggest steps any American president has ever taken on climate change, proposing new rules to cut emissions at power plants. Yet, by itself, the president’s plan will barely nudge the global emissions that scientists say are threatening the welfare of future generations.
In other words, all the pain that the EPA will cause won’t actually save a single cute polar bear, keep an Arctic ice flow from melting or those pesky oceans from rising, assuming you believe all of the alarmist claims at the heart of the new warming orthodoxy. What, then, is this all about? The answer lies in the gargantuan conceit of the man in the Oval Office.
The official explanation for the gap between the president’s rhetoric and the actual impact of the EPA’s dictates is that what the president wants is to start moving the country in “the right direction.” That’s a sobering thought if you consider that what is happening here is a massive government intervention in the private sector to achieve an ideological rather than an economic goal. Anyone inclined to accept the EPA’s new role riding roughshod over both Congress and the economic interests of the country should think long and hard about the prospect that this is merely the first of a new series of rulings from Washington that could hamstring any hopes of a real recovery in the coming years.
More than that, though, is the fact that what Obama really wants here is to show the international community that he means business about restricting the ability of America to do business. The real audience for this spectacle isn’t so much in blue states where any bow in the direction of environmentalism is applauded as it is abroad where other nations are watching to see if the U.S. is really going to walk the walk on climate change rules that could do damage to the American economy. The president wants the Chinese to see that the U.S. will handicap its own industries in order to set a good example for the Communist nation that almost certainly will do little if anything to cap their own growing carbon emissions.
Why would the U.S. hurt itself merely to take the high ground in negotiations with the Chinese and other developing countries even when the move will do very little to solve the climate problem?
President Obama has sorely missed the international adulation that greeted his election in 2008 but which quickly evaporated when most of his foreign fans began to rightly perceive him as nothing more than a left-leaning garden variety U.S. politician rather than the revolutionary figure they applauded. Obama’s various foreign-policy initiatives have largely failed to garner much interest, let alone cheers, abroad. But by recapturing that moment when perhaps many on the left actually believed his boast about turning back the oceans, he hopes to reestablish himself as the prince of hope and change.
Seen in that light, the large numbers of Americans who will be the losers in this exchange are nothing more than human offerings on the altar of Obama’s vanity. He may not heal the planet or even save his party’s chances in the midterm elections as he slides inevitably into lame-duck status. But as long as he can pose as a new messiah, there is no limit to the number of friends, foes, and innocent bystanders that he will sacrifice.
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