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We need to spend some time on last week’s speech. Charles Krauthammer first.
Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.
Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.
How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.
But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot? As with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.
Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry. That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry. …
And then the speech is treated to vintage Mark Steyn. He ends like this;
… My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day that most people not on the Gulf coast aren’t really that bothered about the spill, and that Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the president has now declared war on the great BP spill – Gulf War 3! – and in this epic conflict the Speechgiver-in-Chief will surely be his own unmanned drone:
“I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin’
Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago
I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin’
Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico…”
Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?
Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those relaunch books to explain why you’re getting back in the game in your country’s hour of need?
“It Takes A Spillage.”
But, would the kid president buck the union bosses? John Fund says no.
In his nationwide address last night on the Gulf crisis, President Obama declared: “We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes.” But at least one congressman isn’t convinced, complaining that Mr. Obama won’t pursue promising solutions if it means bucking his union allies.
Hawaii GOP Rep. Charles Djou, who won his seat in a special election last month, says he’s “disappointed” that Mr. Obama has failed to waive the Jones Act, an antiquated 1920 law mandating that goods shipped between U.S. ports be handled by U.S.-built and -owned ships manned by U.S. crews. Unions fiercely support the law as a means of preserving U.S. jobs. In this case, though, the law might be hindering the recovery of hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast jobs. …
David Harsanyi has speech comments too.
… What about the president’s contention that “we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water”? This is what you might call a meta-truth. Like, for instance, “The sun is dying!” or “The budget will be balanced.”
The oil, coal and natural gas we know exists and haven’t yet drilled for alone would be enough to provide hundreds of years of energy for the nation.
Perhaps it’s a testament to a president who has done more to stimulate belief in free enterprise than any other in 40 years, but 68 percent of Americans, according to a recent Pew poll, believe the nation should expand exploration for coal, gas and oil even after the BP accident.
A larger number of Americans also embrace the idea of clean energy. They embrace balance.
It’s one thing to watch reality battered by environmentalists during good times; it’s quite a different story today. There is no clean energy economy without a severe trade-off that will cost jobs and prosperity.
Now, the president may believe that it’s worthwhile to sacrifice your prosperity on a moral imperative. But let’s not obscure what we’re talking about here.
She wrote speeches for Ronald Maximus, so Peggy Noonan knows something on the subject.
… No reason to join the pile on, but some small points. Two growing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others “experts in academia” on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the “small people” in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.
And when speaking of why proper precautions and safety measures were not in place, the president sternly declared, “I want to know why.” But two months in he should know. And he should be telling us. Such empty sternness is . . . empty.
Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they’re told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don’t look natural, they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in “The Miracle Worker.” …
Another sterling example of the ignorance of government. This from Gateway Pundit.
Against Governor Jindal’s wishes the federal government blocked oil-sucking barges today because they needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board and were having trouble contacting the owners. …
David Warren noticed the idiots in the Coast Guard.
… And as we saw in President Obama’s Tuesday night address, he has every intention to use this largely artificial crisis to leverage energy and environmental legislation that will be vastly more destructive of people’s livelihoods than anything now washing ashore.
For consider: a very large part of the population of the U.S. Gulf states depend directly or indirectly on those (surviving) oil platforms. When the U.S. government shuts them down, for an extended period, out of environmentalist unction, it does vastly more aggregate economic damage — to those human beings — than to the ones who may be minding oyster beds. And the latter would anyway be compensated under existing and long-established tort law.
Indeed, litigation was an issue for down the road. Cleaning up the spill is the issue now; but it is clearly beyond the competence of the Obama administration. They still have not done any of the things the Bush administration did, promptly, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to remove bureaucratic obstacles to the rescue efforts.
They have, to use just one of the more spectacular examples, the Coast Guard grounding a fleet of barges from the state of Louisiana that were sucking up surface oil directly threatening the coast, in order to do leisurely and irrelevant safety checks. They have multiple overlapping environmental agencies, with their multiple overlapping veto powers, putting mountains of paperwork in the way of every other effort. It is “business as usual” for the bureaucracies, two full months after the initial catastrophe. …
Wadayakno? It’s like someone is finally getting some sense. The NY Times reports yesterday states are starting to cut pensions. Doesn’t look like it will hit the Illinois millionaires we posted on in the last Pickings, but it’s a start.
Many states are acknowledging this year that they have promised pensions they cannot afford and are cutting once-sacrosanct benefits, to appease taxpayers and attack budget deficits.
Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, the highest of any state, and capped public pensions at $106,800 a year. Arizona, New York, Missouri and Mississippi will make people work more years to earn pensions. Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time. New Jersey will not give anyone pension credit unless they work at least 32 hours a week.
“We can’t afford to deny reality or delay action any longer,” said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, adding that his state’s pension cuts, enacted in March, will save some $300 million in the first year alone.
But there is a catch: Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.
Lawmakers wanted to avoid legal battles or fights with unions, whose members can be influential voters. So they are allowing most public workers across the country to keep building up their pensions at the same rate as ever. The tens of thousands of workers now on Illinois’s payrolls, for instance, will still get to retire at 60 — and some will as young as 55. …