The president’s inaugural address removed any doubt that he and his leftist cohorts who are now the ruling class in America will be pushing aggressively for the entire progressive wish list.
With healthcare and financial reform already in the books, Obama will be particularly aggressive on those leftist policies which he has always wanted to enact but did not pursue in his first term for political reasons.
He has already achieved a $600,000,000,000 tax increase. Efforts to outlaw more weapons and increase federal gun control laws are in high gear. Immigration reform – perhaps even with actual changes in the law rather than by executive proclamation this time – will soon hit the legislative docket. And then there is the issue the president elevated to newfound prominence in his speech – climate change.
Those of us who grew up being taught that science was about facts – that’s why it’s science as opposed to art – have had trouble coming to grips with climate science being reduced to pure politics.
We have for years been witnessing a circular debate over climate change – formerly called global warming until the left discovered that the cataclysmic warming trend about which they had warned us has slowed down or stopped. Nevertheless, the majority view has been formulated in large part by an academic community dependent on federal grants that essentially require them to serve as an amen chorus on climate change.
But that’s hardly the end of it. While the environmental extremists continue pushing their political science, they also continue trying to shut down debate by demonizing those who dare to disagree. Their claim that their climate change agenda is based on what they call settled science is patently false, but they label those who refuse to go along as deniers. The parallel to those who denied the holocaust is unmistakable and shameful. But this is also political science…straight out of the Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals playbook:
RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.
Another defining feature of Alinsky is the permanent campaign. The president is acting like he is still running for office, and has morphed his successful re-election campaign operation into a grassroots lobbying organization that will press a bold, full-throated leftist agenda.
Most of us are incapable of understanding the breadth of science regarding the environment. And thus we are unable to evaluate this debate properly – with pure science rather than junk science.
In the absence of such ability, we should do what we do any time we are purchasing goods, services or information about which we know little. Consider the source, or more specifically the history and track record of that source.
Nothing represents the political mainstream any better than Time Magazine, and as the dueling magazine covers pictured above clearly demonstrate, the same crowd that was warning us of an impending ice age 30 years ago, are now warning us of the opposite.
Though the extremists have tried to argue that any and all dramatic changes in weather (cooling, warming, any natural disaster) can be incorporated into their climate change manifesto, do you trust or attach credibility to sources that have completely reversed their position? And not just from one conclusion to another, but from one catastrophic conclusion to another.
Indeed, it seems any alarmist clarion call will do for the left, as long as it requires wrenching changes in our way of life, more burdens on the business sector, and of course, as always, more government control.
Even though we have more coal than any nation on earth and rising energy costs, we have already seen the virtual death of the coal industry in the wake of the president’s proud assertion that new EPA regulations will essentially stop any expansion of this industry.
And the left knows full well, and in fact embraces, the staggering costs associated with global efforts to address this climate change, even though they as much as admit that US acceptance of the Kyoto Protocol and other crippling global regulatory schemes will not make any appreciable difference in the temperature of the planet. But instead of doing the logical thing and rejecting the treaty or its tenets, they respond by stipulating that it will take not just this, but many more such treaties to fix the problem.
That is a truly frightening proposition, because it is based on the essential premise that governments can change the weather. Think about that. What kind of arrogance is required to believe, as Obama famously claimed about himself, that politicians can control the rise of the oceans and the fall of the planet?
The victim in all this is legitimate environmentalism. We should be continuing our largely successful efforts to reduce litter and curb air and water pollution, and striving to reduce energy consumption and develop alternative and clean sources of energy through a free market. But this legitimate environmental agenda is entirely undermined by the purveyors of an extreme agenda based on political science.
You know what happened to the boy who cried wolf.
