First Principles

Barack Obama’s speech today in Germany was, even before he gave it, the epitome of chutzpah in action.  He’s not the president yet, and yet here he was, acting the part.

Who is this junior Senator, whose accomplishments to date have all been verbs with only one subject (himself) and no object?  He organized.  He got elected.  He hoped and believed.  That his organizing and hoping and getting elected have actually accomplished nothing of note or consequence is of no matter, for He Hath Come Unto Us!  Believing his own press, he felt himself worthy to preach to the world about unity when he couldn’t unite his party in the primaries.  He spoke of standing on principle against long odds and evil ideologies, when he couldn’t bring himself to walk away from a racist church if it meant a political setback.  He apologized for (what are in his mind) his country’s mistakes (and on foreign soil!) when he cannot even admit his own.

And he spoke of controlling the weather.

That’s right:

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations – including my own – will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

You heard The Man, boys and girls.  If only we elect Obama President of the World United States, he will wave his hands and stop hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and hail.  Lighting will spark no more fires in California, flash floods will go the way of smallpox as a natural phenomenon, and he will make sure it doesn’t ever, ever rain on wedding days – because unlike that wimp God, Obama won’t have to stop to rest on Sundays.

There is much in the speech to criticize.  He mangles historical facts at the rate of about one per four words.  Hippy tropes (I’m a citizen of the world!) abound.  But this particular paragraph says a great deal about the underlying philosophy of the man.

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The first is the call for unity, which while sounding nice, is actually tremendously ominous.  There are a great many nations in the world I don’t particularly care to stand as one with.  And closer to home, I don’t want to “stand as one” while our economy is centralized, my liberties are forfeit, my property rights become eco-treason, and dissenting scientific viewpoints are ignored, all to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

Unity itself is not always a good thing.  I like a two party, adversarial system, where the decisions of one side are constantly being challenged by the other in the open forum of the national media.  I like tension between branches of government, and between state and federal governments.  Where there is total unity, there is total lethargy of the brain.  When you aren’t forced to defend your views, your ideas become sloppy and unrefined.  (Given the fawning over Obama by the press, this actually explains a lot.)  When ideas are pitted against each other, the best of them will rise to the top.

And of course, when “unity” is the goal, dissenters become the enemy.

Where are all the hippies with their “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism” when you need them?

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The second thing is the laughable assertion that Europe is acting with any kind of “seriousness of purpose” when it comes to the environment.  In the EU, treaties seem to be exercises in self-congratulatory imagemaking, to be ignored when profitable politically or economically.  Here, they’re the supreme law of the land.  France and Russia traded with Saddam in contravention of the UN sanctions, keeping the dictator in power and allowing him the illusion of and the capacity to rebuild WMDs, after all.  But Kyoto might be the most laughable of all.

Europe’s emissions haven’t fallen – they’ve risen. At least in most of Western Europe.  Eastern Europe (including eastern Germany where Obama was speaking) has the collapse of their Communist era industrial base and infrastructure (with the attendant poverty) to thank for their greenness.

Perhaps we, too, should sign treaties and then ignore them.  Is that the way to get the world to love us again?

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The worst thing, though, is the idea Obama clearly clings to that governments (and Presidents) have the power to control the Earth’s weather systems, ocean levels, etc.  This is, of course, nonsense.  Obama is literally shouting at the tide, but unlike King Knut, has not yet realized that nature is unbowed by “Hope” or “Change We Can Believe In” or even “Yes We Can”, no matter how many people faint at your rallies.

And even if what he promises was possible, how is freedom for the individual to survive under a government so big and so powerful that all anti-eco behavior can be stamped out?

I’m far more afraid of President Obama running my life than I am of global warming.

Adding to the arrogance is the idea that we need to “give our children back their futures,” as if they have no say in the matter, or that we took that future away.  (And I don’t really like being lectured about the fate of children’s futures from a man who thinks nothing of partial brith abortion.)

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The rest is more of the same.  He spent a great deal of time talking about and praising the Berlin Airlift, but I couldn’t help but wonder what President Obama would have done back in 1948.  Would he have worried that the Soviets and their satellite states might not like us as much?  Would he have feared sounding too bellicose?  Would he have said, “We respect the plight of those in West Berlin, but we have pressing domestic needs like universal healthcare that military money can be much better spent on.”  Were he merely a candidate, would he campaign the next two years complaining that the incumbent had “alienated” our long standing “allies” by not accommodating them?  Would he condemn Communism as a whole, or only take aim at the “extreme” Communists?

Something tells me the images from Berlin would have been closer to helicopters shaking off refugees in Saigon as that city fell to the brutal tyranny of the same, evil philosophy that enslaved half of Europe the decade before.

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In the end, I can only trust in my faith in the American people to see through the transparency, the arrogance, and the fragility of this man, and I believe this speech will help with that.  What plays in the salons of European elites won’t win him the support of the majority of the American people.

But if I’m wrong, then hey!  At least it won’t rain the next time I have a BBQ.