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Understanding economics requires the ability to see an action’s unintended consequences. WSJ Editors write on one consequence that ignorant and corrupt dems should have anticipated.
… A tariff imposed to please a powerful domestic constituency leads to retaliation that whacks innocent bystanders who lack the ear of the White House or Speaker of the House. In this case, a payoff to the Teamsters stuffed in a spending bill has now become a hardship for the farm growers and workers of Oregon. We elect Presidents to stop this kind of economic damage, not to promote it.
Instapundit has a graphic illustration of just how bad Obama’s budgets are. Bush was awful. The kid is off the charts.
Peter Wehner posts on BO’s willingness to trash our country.
At convenient points on his overseas trip President Obama purposefully disfigured reality in a way that reflected poorly on America. That is to say, an American president played up cartoon images of the United States in order to get foreign audiences to applaud him. It is rare for the leader of a nation to revise history in order to make his nation look worse. But for Obama, the upside — making himself look good — is an easy trade-off. One senses that when it comes to Obama, it is all, and always, about him.
In thinking about Obama’s trip, I was reminded of the words of another Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who said this:
Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.
It is almost inconceivable to think of former Democrat, Ronald Reagan, going overseas and criticizing America in the manner Obama did, especially for baseless reasons. …
Jennifer Rubin on the subject.
… You (Peter) raise the possibility that there is a certain potent egotism at work here — the desire to be adored by not just the American public but by a world audience, which of course doesn’t always think very highly of America. But that should be no problem for Obama who finds his country’s behavior to be arrogant and self-centered and insufficiently concerned with others. How nice that he can bond with international audiences in their mutual disdain for America’s behavior. …
Charles Krauthammer picks up the theme in “Your County Too, Mr. President.”
… With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.
And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.
He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.
From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.
And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he’ll have to leave his bridge partner behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they’re not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?
When Austria is mocking you, you’re having a bad week. …
… It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country’s decline. A few more such overseas tours, and Obama will have a lot more decline to celebrate.
Mark Steyn writes on all the distractions coming at the kid president. Perhaps we should be thankful for them. Otherwise he could do real damage.
The Reuters headline put it this way: “Pirates Pose Annoying Distraction For Obama.”
So many distractions, aren’t there? Only a week ago, the North Korean missile test was an “annoying distraction” from Barack Obama’s call for a world without nuclear weapons and his pledge that America would lead the way in disarming. And only a couple of days earlier the president insisted Iraq was a “distraction” – from what, I forget: The cooing press coverage of Michelle’s wardrobe? No doubt when the Iranians nuke Israel, that, too, will be an unwelcome distraction from the administration’s plans for federally subsidized day care, just as Pearl Harbor was an annoying distraction from the New Deal, and the First World War was an annoying distraction from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s dinner plans
If the incompetent management driving The New York Times from junk status to oblivion wished to decelerate their terminal decline, they might usefully amend their motto to “All The News That’s Fit To Distract.” Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the past 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and “distractions,” as opposed to about 800 “distractions” for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: “First North Korea, Iran – now Somali pirates.” …
… When all the world’s a “distraction,” maybe you’re not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will. Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity. Don’t be surprised if “the civilized world” shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a “distraction” but a portent of the future.
David Warren continues his columns on the the kid’s excellent adventures with “Innocents Abroad.”
… Barack Obama, is back in Washington after an apology tour to Europe, Turkey, and Iraq. He received no European commitments whatever for his proposed surge-like strategy in Afghanistan. (The word “surge” is now banned in White House parlance, along with the phrase “war on terror” and several related terms. With the help of supinely obliging media, the very ability to describe a conflict may soon be, as it were, “withdrawn.”)
So far as I am able to discover, President Obama’s most significant accomplishment abroad was getting President Sarkozy of France to accept exactly one of the 245 Guantanamo inmates currently on offer to anyone who wants them.
The strategy behind the new Obama foreign policy, so far as any can be discerned, is to disavow everything the Bush administration did in eight years, and then harvest the resulting good will. And while the product of this strategy is zero, it has been charitably observed that his term in office has hardly begun.
Just so we can remember all the foolish things George W. Bush did as president, we are now learning biofuels (ethanol) might be a hazard. The Economist has the story.
… just as governments have committed themselves to the greater use of biofuels (see table), questions are being raised about how green this form of energy really is. The latest come from a report produced by a team of scientists working on behalf of the International Council for Science (ICSU), a Paris-based federation of scientific associations from around the world.
The ICSU report concludes that, so far, the production of biofuels has aggravated rather than ameliorated global warming. In particular, it supports some controversial findings published in 2007 by Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Dr Crutzen concluded that most analyses had underestimated the importance to global warming of a gas called nitrous oxide (N2O) by a factor of between three and five. The amount of this gas released by farming biofuel crops such as maize and rape probably negates by itself any advantage offered by reduced emissions of CO2.
Although N2O is not common in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it hangs around longer. The upshot is that, over the course of a century, its ability to warm the planet is almost 300 times that of an equivalent mass of CO2. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who was involved in writing the ICSU report, said that although the methods used by Dr Crutzen could be criticised, his fundamental conclusions were correct. …
WSJ has the story of how Ronald Reagan rescued a director from Hollywood’s blacklist.
In Kirk Douglas’s new one-man stage play, “Before I Forget,” he entertains audiences with the story of how he “broke” the blacklist. In 1960, he used his influence as the executive producer and star of the movie “Spartacus” to give known communist writer Dalton Trumbo on-screen credit for the script. It is regarded as a watershed moment in the movie business — the first time that an artist who was blacklisted by Hollywood for his communist associations was rescued from the shadows.
But as noteworthy as Mr. Douglas’s action was, the first time a blacklistee was openly brought back into the Hollywood fold actually came almost a decade earlier with the rehabilitation of 42-year-old director and former communist Edward Dmytryk. A young Ronald Reagan, of all people, was substantially responsible. …
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