Amused Cynic

I had to reprise Jay Nordlinger’s closing remark from yesterday’s piece, linked here. He was referring to the media’s successful negative makeovers for Bush, Cheney, and Palin, but the point deserves expansion to address the continuing phenomenon of crisis-mongering by the MSM. In fact, I will complete his politely redacted remark in toto: We have become a country with its head up its ass. And we’re incapable of effective self government from that vantage point, because you can’t see nothin’ up there. Which is where they want us, so that we will leave the quaint notion of self-government to the experts in Congress and the MSM.

Take “climate change,” for example. As has been drily noted in this witty piece and elsewhere, it’s kind of hard to keep calling in “global warming” in the face of record cold and snowstorms. Not a problem, just change the name to climate change. Congressman Henry Waxman now plans to nationalize energy policy and introduce price caps….and guess what! It will also, he promises, stimulate the economy and hasten the end of the economic crisis! A twofer!

The carbon footprint of Barack Obama’s inauguration could exceed 575 million pounds of CO2. According to the Institute for Liberty, it would take the average U.S. household nearly 60,000 years of naughty ecological behavior to produce a carbon footprint equal to the largest self-congratulatory event in the history of humankind.

The same congressfolk who now are handing out thousands of tickets to this ecological disaster mandated only recently the phased elimination of the incandescent light bulb — a mere carbon tiptoe, if you will. The whole thing seems a bit unfair.

And on the day millions of Americans were freezing their collective backside off, the new Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Henry Waxman, announced that Congress would fast-track climate change legislation. Waxman claimed, as The Associated Press put it, “Inaction on the climate issue is causing uncertainties that make it more difficult to emerge from the recession.”

Waxman’s methane emission merely would reek if it weren’t so catastrophically sad. I learned long ago that any dissent on climate alarmism will be met with unflinching fury, but is there anyone who can argue genuinely that inaction on “climate issues” (formerly known as global warming) has had a fundamental impact on the economic downturn?[...]The day Waxman delivered his statement, the National Weather Service issued a warning for Chicago about the wind chill index being somewhere in the vicinity of 25 to 40 below zero. In Maine, citizens expected temperatures to be about 40 below zero. And Iowans were warned that it could drop to 27 degrees below zero. In many places across the nation, there was record-setting cold.

So in other words, Waxman expects these unfortunate glacial souls to pay higher energy prices to shield themselves from Arctic chills in the name of global warming?

That’s quite a trick.

Victor David Hanson comments further on the “economic crisis” and notes correctly, Rahm Emmanuel’s revealingly Machiavellian remark: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

Yet much of what is driving this national hysteria in our reaction to the current economic downturn is psychological. After all, no plagues, wars or earthquakes have killed our workforce, destroyed our infrastructure or wiped out our computer banks.

Instead, for years now we have overspent and over-borrowed — and must naturally pay up. And like any chastised debtor, panicked Americans logically have temporarily clammed up and are holding on to what money they have left.

In response, the government apparently doesn’t only want to free up credit to get us back to our profligate habits of borrowing what we don’t have so we can buy what we don’t need. It also would like to create new programs to build infrastructure; guarantee new loans; and offer additional credits, bailouts and entitlements.

Or in the words of incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Remember the “Civil Liberties” and the “Torture” crises? The ones that had “shredded the Constitution”? Well, it seems that even Newsweek now seems to think those crises are over, now that a Democrat will be in charge, even though he’s now made it clear that he’s not going to change Bush/Cheney policy any time soon, if ever. As Charles Krauthammer points out:

Obama still disagrees with Cheney’s view of the acceptability of some of these techniques. But citing as sage the advice offered by “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history” (according to Joe Biden) — advice paraphrased by Obama as “we shouldn’t be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric” — is a startlingly early sign of a newly respectful consideration of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

Not from any change of heart. But from simple reality. The beauty of democratic rotations of power is that when the opposition takes office, cheap criticism and calumny will no longer do. The Democrats now own Iraq. They own the war on al-Qaeda. And they own the panoply of anti-terror measures with which the Bush administration kept us safe these last seven years.

Which is why Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls “campaign rhetoric” and the policy choices he must now make as president. Accordingly, Newsweek — Obama acolyte and scourge of everything Bush/Cheney — has on the eve of the Democratic restoration miraculously discovered the arguments for warrantless wiretaps, enhanced interrogation and detention without trial. Indeed, Newsweek’s neck-snapping cover declares, “Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney’s Vision of Power.”

Have you noticed that the notion of a bailout plan for newspapers, once parodied here, has become a serious suggestion only two months later?

One of the most troubling aspects of Obama nominating a TV personality for Surgeon General: Will he have a conflict of interest in attempting to solve the most serious health crisis facing the US today—Cranial-Anal Impaction?

Related: A look at the Real Guantanamo….that crisis you’ve been told about. The one that required the defeat of the evil Bush/Cheney totalitarian juggernaut:

I recently visited the detention facilities at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and was dismayed at what I saw. The place was nothing like what I expected, and I was struck by how little we Americans actually know about these facilities and the conduct of our personnel there. With every new interview and every new area walk-through I hoped to find some validation of the certainties I brought with me from the hundreds of articles, documentaries, and speeches presented to the American people by our intellectual superiors.

Instead, my experiences at Guantanamo Bay illustrate the thoroughness of the miseducation of the American people and our willingness to assume the worst about our men and women in uniform. Furthermore, the visit clearly demonstrated that there is a widespread ignorance of the complexity of the situation that we face in the current war against our terrorist enemies. This ignorance results in a focus on superficial issues instead of core questions, and a naive trust in false stories and an astonishing proclivity to be misled.