By Alan Caruba
Watching the Obama campaign is akin to watching a movie about a train wreck that you know is coming because you know that there’s been a mountain slide and the tracks just around the bend are covered with huge boulders.
So you watch the train speed along, oblivious to the destruction that awaits it as you conjure up images in your mind of the toppled cars, the screams of the victims. And you can’t do a thing about it.
By all rights, Obama should be way ahead in the polls. And he isn’t.
By all rights, Obama’s health plan should be receiving plaudits. And it isn’t.
By all rights, Obama’s solutions to the nation’s energy needs should find some support among the media and those who believe he will bring the kind of change that will make everything right again. But it’s not.
So long as Obama could stick to vague talk of “change we can believe in” and “yes, we can”, the crowds could cheer.
Every time he comes close to addressing a real problem, however, the silence is deafening.
Here’s a guy whose whole campaign is predicated on his having been against the Iraq war, but during the 143 days he spent in the U.S. Senate since 2004, when not campaigning to be your President, he voted for every bill that funded it. Ah, yes, a man of principle!
Hillary had it right. Not only would his universal health plan not work without requiring that everybody sign up, it would--like hers—bankrupt the nation and destroy our national health system. As it is, Medicare is already piling up debt beyond what the government could ever hope to pay. Some future Congress will hand the bill to your grandchildren.
As for energy, Obama seems to live somewhere that doesn’t depend on oil in a thousand different ways. That place is not planet Earth.
Here on Earth, we use oil as energy for transportation of every description other than bicycles. Plastic begins as oil and plastic is in everything we use. We keep jars of it in the bathroom cabinet. It’s called Vasoline. Or suntan lotion.
Should we be drilling in ANWR? You bet! Should we be drilling offshore of the nation’s coastlines? Of course. We drill offshore of parts of California and throughout the Gulf of Mexico. What’s wrong with sucking oil out of the seabed a couple of miles beyond Asbury Park?
McCain is calling for 45 nuclear plants to be built to meet our need for electricity. We would be lucky if we could build half that number in the next twenty years, but first we have to get rid of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. This moron will not allow the multi-billion dollar nuclear waste storage facility the government has built in Nevada to open.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told us her job is to save the Earth, but that didn’t stop her from turning off the lights and going on vacation.
We could easily build 45 coal-fired plants. The U.S. has plenty of coal if the government will only let it be mined in places that, among others, Bill Clinton declared a national heritage or refuge or whatever.
It’s fun to watch Obama stumble around. It would be even more fun to watch his wife, Michelle, but she is being kept under wraps. Has anyone seen her lately? Michelle, who grew up in middle class comfort, went to both Princeton and Harvard, is just terribly unhappy about America. Apparently she thinks being black was some kind of obstacle for her.
In a strange kind of way, McCain doesn’t have to do much to defeat Obama. He just has to let Obama be Obama.
Viewing your election year from afar, as a right-wing Englishman with only a passing knowledge of American politics, it really is a sight to behold. If I can compare your choices with those of Britain one thing is immediately apparent: you are lumbered with a dithering cast of protagonists who are some moves removed from the public feeling, both playing catch-up in an effort to please an increasingly aware and discriminatory public.
ReplyDeleteThis shilly-shallying is so transparent as views are replaced with alternate views to garner votes from one ethnic group to another. I’m sure you have the saying, “You can please some of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time”. The problem is that McCain and Obama are faced with squaring the ethnic circle. Obama is flashing the ceramic and charming the masses with his Caesar-like omni-presence; McCain, an also-ran in the personality stakes but his track record is winning-out as his wisps of grey hair prove that he has been there, done that.
Britain has the somewhat less-graying incumbent versus the refulgent flashing Cameron – Brown the one who has been there, done that, versus the young Pretender, the one with zero.
From afar, neither Britain’s pair nor the State’s pair is going to do the trick that we all want to see. We are all going to be disappointed because these men are not their own men. They are pulled and pushed and coerced, paid-for, bought and pressured beyond all reasonableness into an impossible position of compromise. On both sides of ‘the pond’ we, the voters, have little say other than a cross in a box for one or another – but something is missing, don’t you think? Real choice is denied us. For us in the UK we get who is foisted upon us by the respective parties; we get Hobson’s Choice – like it or lump it, chaps. Left or Right is now evermore Centralist
Anyway, at least on both sides of the Atlantic, the tide of silly ideas is slowly changing from horizon to horizon windmills to the possibility that reliable energy churning nuclear and clean-coal power generation is to be preferred. The Great Fear is that any government may have to contemplate a scenario of black-outs and brown-outs and the consequences to their ‘popularity’.
The reins on the Green horse, racing towards ‘self-sufficiency’ are being pulled back in the face of a brutal reality that the horse they should be riding, the one that is going to enable civilization to prosper and survive, is going in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, the UK has sold the only company that can deliver a nuclear option. Our next contender, Rolls Royce, is racing to meet the challenge but we are now years behind in expertise and at the back of a long and growing queue for working plant.
The dreamers dream, still, of a Green Utopia on the near horizon, the Elysian Fields in the here-and-now. They fail to realize that their donkey cart needs grease to stop the squeaking Even the simplest transport requires a cup of oil-based products to keep it running: wheel, steering head, crank and pedal bearings need grease as the cables require frequent oiling. With some four billion bicycles in the world that adds up to a consummate oil requirement – or maybe we would all be able to kill a pig for our lubrication needs.
Clive in the Philippines
Well said, Clive.
ReplyDeleteI have to wonder if the democrats are really interested in the presidency, or prefer to remain in opposition ( or obstruction). after all, congress is where the pork is passed out, and dems thrive on bringing home the bacon, to their districts.
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps it's just mismanagement, that allowed a first term senator to get past the primary without much examination. Political correctness, and a tendency towards fan-club hysteria made obama beyond criticism for most of the primaries - only the last couple states began to realize what a loon was getting the nomination. Sometimes democrat stupidity is a good thing. Hillary could actually win.