Yes, there is an Obama doctrine

Ed Morrissey has put together a very useful post summarizing various liberal media attempts to understand the Obama doctrine.  Morrissey concludes at the end that, try as hard as one likes, “There really is no doctrine.”

Morrissey is correct that there is no doctrine if one is looking for a verbally articulated doctrine.  Obama says everything, and Obama says nothing, and Obama says it all as boringly as possible.

The mere fact that the greatest communicator since Abraham Lincoln (that’s sarcasm, by the way) is incapable of articulating a doctrine, though, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.  Indeed, if one buys for one minute into the whole greatest communicator shtick, it’s pretty clear that, as I said in my earlier post, that Obama intentionally obfuscates in his speeches because he doesn’t want people to know what the doctrine is.

Fortunately, because actions speak louder than words, we can arrive at the Obama Middle Eastern doctrine without any actual verbal help from Obama.  Here goes:

America can no longer selfishly engage in wars that directly affect (i.e., improve) her national interests.  To prevent her from doing so, she must always sublimate her sovereignty to the U.N.  A small number of U.N. players, most notably Europeans who are dependent on Libyan oil, have decided that Qaddafi must go.  Even though the number is smaller than the number that joined with Bush on Iraq, they’re the “in” crowd, so Obama must follow where they lead.  Hewing to the popular kid theory, these “cool” U.N. players matter more than the American Congress, which is made up of rubes and hicks, who lack that European savoir faire, even the useful idiots who hew to Obama’s political ideology.

A subset of this Obama doctrine is that, while America must never mine or drill her own energy resources, it is incumbent upon America to dig into her pockets to enable other countries to get to their energy resources, which America will then buy back at a premium.  This is American charity at its best.  If you want to feed a man for a day, buy him a fish.  If you want to feed him for a lifetime, teach him to fish, buy all his fishing equipment, stock the lake with trout, break all your fishing equipment, make it illegal to fish in your own lakes, and then buy that man’s fish back from him at the highest possible price.

And whatever else you do, make sure you kick Israel around . . . a lot.  That will make the cool kids (e.g., the Euro-trash and the Mullahs) happy.  It never pays to lose sight of your true constituency.

America’s carbon footprint and the world’s oil reserves

I’ve got two quick environmental links for you today.  The first has to do with pollution.  You know that I’ve said at this blog all along that cap-and-trade is stupid, not only because it will destroy America’s economy, but because the really big up-and-coming polluters are China and India.  Turns out I was wrong:  they’re not up-and-coming; they’re here and now, as are Africa and the Gulf countries.  America is a pollution piker.

Also, as you may have seen before, there is increasing evidence that oil is not a finite resource, dependent on the transformation of prehistoric plant and animal matter.  Instead, it might be a recurring product produced in the very bowels of the earth.  Cool.  (H/t Pierre  of Pierre Legrand’s Pink Flamingo Bar)

Speaking of Newspeak — how about Kerry and Boxer on energy?

Even working together, Babs Boxer and John Kerry are still unable to beat Palin’s clear message and, instead, come out with meaningless government speak.  I can’t resist a very light fisking of their opinion piece for the WaPo, which does precisely what my blog slogan says Democrats do:  they take conclusions and try to sell them as facts. I’ll be so light that I won’t dive into underlying facts. I’ll just expose the nonsense on the face of the document.  Also, out of deference for fair use principles, I’m not going to fisk the whole thing, just bits and pieces.  And with those caveats, here goes:

Palin argues that “the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!” The truth is, clean energy legislation doesn’t make energy scarcer or more expensive; it works to find alternative solutions to our costly dependence on foreign oil and provides powerful incentives to pursue cutting-edge clean energy technologies.  [Objection your honor:  non-responsive!  Have Babs and the French-looking guy said anything here that belies the claim that new energy will be scarcer and more expensive?  They’ve said they’d like to cut spending on foreign oil, but that has nothing to do with scarcity or cost.  They’ve also said the government will provide financial incentives for new energy, but that sounds costly — and there’s no guarantee that there is affordable and clean new energy to be had, at least in the short term.  In other words, they’ve said nothing at all that counters Palin’s claim that new government clean energy proposals will make energy scarce and costly.]

Palin asserts that job losses are “certain.” Wrong. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and American Clean Energy and Security legislation will create significant employment opportunities across the country in a broad array of sectors linked to the clean energy economy. Studies at the federal level and by states have demonstrated clean energy job creation. A report by the Center for American Progress calculated that $150 billion in clean energy investments would create more than 1.7 million domestic and community-based jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.  [Again, Babs and Kerry take the known problems expensive energy creates (inflation, job loss, a slowing economy and, against those history-proven facts, make the groundless promise that they’ll make some new jobs in a private sector devoted to trying to figure out ways to come up with a better solution than fossil fuel.  As to that dream, it would help if, at the very least, they’d work out how to make fossil fuel cleaner and more efficient.  But noooo.  This wagon is hooked to stars such as biofuels, which take food out of the mouths of poor people; electric cars, which use lots of fossil fuel to create the electricity and which work only in densely populated areas where people can tank up quickly; solar energy, which works only where the sun shines (tough luck for those in cold, foggy areas); wind energy, which has proven to be spectacularly unreliable, etc.  One day, alternative energies may be the answer, but to make traditional energy sources impossibly expensive, while sucking money out of the economy to fund pie-in-the-sky “alternatives” is certain to lose jobs.]

[snip]

Take the acid rain program established in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. The naysayers said it would cost consumers billions in higher electricity rates, but electricity rates declined an average of 19 percent from 1990 to 2006. Naysayers said the cost to business would be more than $50 billion a year, but health and other benefits outweighed the costs 40 to 1. Naysayers predicted it would cost the economy millions of jobs. In fact, the United States added 20 million jobs from 1993 to 2000, as the U.S. economy grew 64 percent.  [This may true.  However, since I don’t trust the source, how am I do know that, but for the Clean Air Act Amendments, the economy wouldn’t have grown by a vastly greater amount.  As it is, I happen to enjoy clean fresh air.  I’m interested in reasonable, market-driven responses to cleaner energy that doesn’t fund terrorists.  That doesn’t justify crap-and-tax, though, does it?]

The carefully crafted clean energy bill that we will present to the Senate [pardon me while I laugh hysterically as Babs uses the phrase “carefully crafted” to describe anything that’s coming out of the House right now], building on the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the House, will jump-start our economy, protect consumers, stop the ravages of unchecked global climate change and ensure that the United States — not China or India — will be the leading economic power in this century. [And this will work because we’re sending to China and India, countries unconstrained by these bills, all the jobs that American employers can no longer afford to pay for?  Help me.  I’m confused.]

Anyway, you get the idea. Go to the WaPo, and read the article for yourself. See if you find it more convincing than I do.

Something for which to blame Obama

One post ago, I said I was going to wait and see until Obama does something before I get upset.  Now I’m upset.  I got around to reading the AP article announcing that one of Obama’s first acts will be to reinstate the ban on offshore and natural gas drilling.  That’s the ban that, when in place, saw our gasoline soar to almost $4.00 per gallon.  That wasn’t just a hit to every person driving a car.  It was a hit to every school district running buses.  It was a hit to every grocery store getting food to the shelves.  It was a hit to every farm using gasoline powered equipment to harvest food.  It was a hit to every flight moving people around the United States and around the world.  And on and on, throughout the American economy, at every level and affecting every person.

That same ban was also a huge blessing to OPEC en masse, as well as to its individual members.  It also made Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Russia and Venezuela very, very happy.  Just as the ban was a bad thing for us at every point in our economy, it was a blessing for those who loath us.

And what happened when Bush let the offshore oil drilling ban lapse in the face of a Democratic Congress afraid to jink the election?  Prices plummeted, and quickly too.  Even here, in one of the priciest parts of America, you can now get gasoline for less then $2.00 a gallon if you’re willing to drive a few miles from the pricier sections of Marin.  My local Safeway has sales on everything.  As their shipping costs have dropped, they’re racing to pass the savings on to customers.  It’s not beneficence on Safeway’s part.  It’s good business.  If they can drop their prices faster than their competitors can, they get the customers.

And just as we in America are benefiting hugely from the mere possibility of offshore drilling, the oil producing nations, almost all of which are hostile to us, are worried.  OPEC is talking about price fixing to keep those petrodollars flowing into Wahhabi coffers.

So what’s Barack Obama’s first planned move?  As I said above, it’s to reinstate the offshore oil ban, as well as to kill domestic natural gas production!  I kid you not:

President-elect Barack Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

[snip]

On drilling, the federal Bureau of Land Management is opening about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling. Bush administration officials argue that the drilling will not harm sensitive areas; environmentalists oppose it.

“They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah,” Podesta said. “I think that’s a mistake.”

Clearly, one of the things we as conservatives can do is remind hurting consumers every single day that it was President Bush who made gas prices (and therefore all prices) drop when he allowed the ban to lapse, and President Obama who made every aspect of our lives more costly.

And if, God forbid, some Wahhabi extremists launch a deadly, well-funded attack against the U.S. in 2009, it’s up to us to remind the American people that it was the extremist environmental policies espoused by the Democrats (Obama included) that funded that ideology and those attacks.

I was hoping that Obama would govern as a centrist, given his narcissistic need to retain power and popularity.  He’s making it clear, though, that he will govern as an ideologue, pandering to the base, and to hell with the best interests of America and her citizens.

Keeping my mouth shut re Georgia

“Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve said nothing about Russia invading Georgia.  This is, in part, because the exigencies of the past week have deprived me of time to read in detail about it.  I only know headlines and, since I have absolutely no background in the geography or the conflict, this means I’m abysmally ignorant.

The silence is also because, to the extent I have managed to grasp what’s going on out there, I don’t have anything to add to the discussion, or anything that I feel I want to voice personally despite the fact that so many others are saying the same thing.  Yes, Putin is a totalitarian dictator, but we’ve known that about him for a long time, and many of us have just been sitting here waiting to see how is old KGB attitudes end up merging with his megalomaniac traits.  Yes, this is all about oil.  Yes, this represents a very dangerous trend, although it’s as unclear now as it was during the Cold War whether Russia has the ability to back up its aggressive initiatives.  It’s easy to go in with the remaining guns from your former glory and squash a teeny little Republic.  It’s harder to maintain any long campaigns.  And yes, McCain showed leadership abilities, with Obama showing, first, ignorance (which is excusable in me, but not in him) and, second, the ability to follow McCain’s lead.

And yes, I’ve run out of echoing other, wiser people on the terrible tragedy, at the hands of a gross, bullying dictatorship, that is playing out in Georgia.

When Exxon does well, we all do well

Forget Exxon’s “greedy” shareholders.  The New Editor reminds us (which is something the MSM overlooked), that when Exxon does well, we all do well.

I’m Bookworm, and I approved of this ad

America’s electricity is not oil-based

It’s a bit slow, but it’s a very useful reminder of the fact that many of the energy sources about which reporters get excited (wind, solar, etc.), will not solve the oil crisis.

Hat tip:  Dan Best

The seeds of hatred

The accepted wisdom is that the intense hatred the Palestinians feel for Jews is a direct result of Jewish annexation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 War. Of course, as with most propaganda, this is false. Aside from conveniently ignoring the 1956 and 1948 Wars, not to mention the Koran itself, this view ignores the fact that it was a Nazi/Arab alliance that helped fuel the virulence of modern Arab antisemitism. Indeed, it was this alliance, as much as the oil in Arab lands, that caused the British, who had been fairly philosemitic since Cromwell’s days because of their commitment to the Old Testament, to swing around and become extremely hostile to the movement for a Jewish state. (As to the long-dead philosemitism, I highly recommend Barbara Tuchman’s Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour .)

Mike Devx was kind enough to send me to a great video illustrating the tight ties the Nazis forged with the Arabs as part of their assault on British interests in the Middle East (for British interests, read “oil” and if you’re really interested in how the need to control oil was a driving force in WWII, read Daniel Yergin’s exellent The Prize : The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.)

Iraq’s producing a lot of oil

This is good news:

Iraqi oil production is above the levels seen before the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA said Iraqi crude production is now running at 2.3 million barrels per day, compared with 1.9 million barrels at the start of this year.

It puts the rise down to the improving security situation in Iraq, especially in the north of the country.

Typically, the IEA goes on to put a lot of negative spin on things, but the core news is good. Even better is that revenue from this oil, rather than going into the pockets of Hussein and his minions, or into the pockets of corrupt UN officials, will, at least in theory, benefit the Iraqi people.