Oh, the poor left.

Here they though they had found the perfect issue: Climate Change (formerly known as Global Warming).

Oh, don’t get me wrong, the planet is definitely warming, and man is the cause. The planet should be cooling right now, on the downslope of the most recent peak, heading toward another “ice age” (not really, but a much colder period lasting thousands of years and extending glaciers deep into North America).

In 2006 we had Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” which crystallized the problem, complete with all sorts of disturbing images. Then the Democrats won control of the Congress, then the presidency itself.

The stage was set. The leftist takeover of government was as close to a sure thing as one could imagine. Soon there would be all sorts of costs assigned to the “old” ways of generating power, and incentives to move toward “new” ways of generating power - a fine idea, by the way. But this was all being sold as NECESSARY! due to global warming. In other words, act now in order to save the planet.

Well, the British Antarctic Survey had to spoil all the fun.

This past week they announced that Antarctica is losing pack ice at the rate of 30 feet per year. Now true, there is a lot of ice in Antarctica, as Gore showed us in AIT. And until now there was no way to know if that ice was at risk. Well, it is. And there was no way to know how long it would take to melt. Well, now we know. At the pace since 2003, the ice will be gone in 150 to 200 years. And since warming is a self-escalating event, the momentum will only increase, meaning that in about 3 or 4 generations, we’ll be living on a planet with sea level perhaps 80 feet higher than they are today, and basically no permanent ice.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

See, even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the planet would not cool. Why? Because the current CO2 levels would continue to rise. Why? Because two thirds of all CO2 ever released by man has been stored in the world ocean, and as soon as we stop throwing more of it into the sky, the ocean will keep giving up what it has stored. And CO2 is persistent; it lasts hundreds of years in the atmosphere.

So, the planet cannot begin to cool - barring something unforeseen, such as a meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes going off at once - for hundreds of years, and we now know that most of the world ice will be gone by then. And by the way, anything that would force sudden cooling would also wipe out most of life as we know it.

So, the major world leaders are in Copenhagen, hoping to hammer out a deal which will complete the transfer of political power to the “greens”, the leftest of the left. Greens are the ones who want to exert maximum control over human behavior. Greens are, basically, communists, and I don’t say that lightly. The believe in the common good at the expense of all else. “Common” is a root of “communism” when you break down the parts.

Now, it may prove to be quite sensible to live communally. After all, man is in the midst of wrecking the planet, which could have been avoided by making better choices along the way, which would have meant telling big business what it could and could not do, and which would have meant slower economic growth.

But let’s face it, economic growth is not something that everybody enjoys. Many nations contribute cheap labor so that other economies can grow, while they are stuck in perpetual second or third class status. In other words, be grateful that you live where you live, or your opinion of the world economy and economic growth would be quite different.

The left told us to follow the science, because in 2006 the science was firmly in their favor. There was still time, we were told, to avoid the worst of global warming. All we had to do was slash emissions by 80 percent in 20 years.

Well, that was not true. I won’t call it a lie, but it was always flimsy. First of all, how was that supposed to happen? Simply turn off the generators? Turn electricity into a rare commodity, which only the rich could afford? That was never going to happen. It was always going to be necessary to transition away from carbon while replacing it with something else, while also maintaining growth.

That conversation never happened, and now it’s just too late.

Clearly, we are going to need to adapt. If you live in coastal Florida today, get what you can for your property and move to higher ground. Say a prayer for the people of Bangladesh and Myanmar, because those countries will basically disappear. Prepare for a world with a lot less land to live on, much warmer than this world, with dried out rivers (no glaciers to feed them) and constant storm activity. Prepare for more desert, especially in the regions nearest the tropics, such as the American southwest.

I am here to tell you that all of those stories you heard will happen, and there is nothing we can do about it, except prepare.

Who can forget candidate Obama famously bowling an incredibly low score in his miserable attempt to look like a regular guy? We all laughed.

It’s not so funny when people are trying to throw you into the gutter. As President, Obama has come under withering attack from the right (sorry, there’s no other way to say that) challenging his very legitimacy as president, insisting he’s not a natural born citizen, for example, and declaring him a socialist, a totalitarianist, an egomaniac and much worse. Over at the Mo’Kelly blog, we learned that a congressman from Missouri recently told a joke about a golf course being over-run with monkeys, likening that to today’s Washington. How clever, comparing the Obama administration to an invasion of monkeys. No racial overtones there…

And so the question is, how to handle it? Remember Michael Douglas as “The American President”:

		SHEPHERD
		Let me see if I've got this: The
		third story on the news tonight was
		that someone I didn't know 13 years
		ago, when I wasn't President,
		participated in a demonstration where
		no laws were being broken in protest
		of something that so many people were
		against it doesn't exist anymore?
			   (beat)
		Just out of curiosity, what was the
		fourth story?

				LEWIS
		See, I think it's important, when we
		deal with it, that we--

				SHEPHERD
		Don't deal with it.

				LEWIS
		Excuse me?

				SHEPHERD
		They're trying to get us to swing at
		a pitch in the dirt. No one ever
		wins these fights. It'll go away.

				LEWIS
		I'm not sure that's the wisest--

				SHEPHERD
		Aw...hell!

				ROBIN
		See, it's already distracting you.
		Why don't you let A.J. and Lewis--

				SHEPHERD
		No, you reminded me, I'm supposed to
		have dinner with Sydney tonight.

“The American President” was only a movie, but I always agreed with the president on that. If you let your sworn enemies dictate the terms of the debate, you have already lost. Obama seems determined to stay above the fray. If anything, his surrogates have not gotten the message. Folks such as Jimmy Carter, who believes he knows what’s in congressman Joe Wilson’s heart, do not help and probably hurt Obama’s efforts to be seen as the president of all the people, far too busy to allow himself to be besieged by petty efforts to bring him down.

There are so many legitimate issues to be challening Obama on, starting with “Obamacare”, which is probably not socialist enough to accomplish the stated objective of bending the cost curve. In his determination to appear “centrist” and “moderate”, Obama will avoid going too far to the perceived political left. Nevermind that this would have been considered a centrist position a generation ago; today, “single-payer” is considered a potentially deadly solution to the health care crisis, which would bring about “rationing of care” and “thousands of doctors fleeing the profession” and “an end to innovation”.

In reality, there is no other long term solution. Paying insurance companies and doctors and hospitals directly with government money, as is already done, cannot help but skew the market conditions. Injecting more government money into the same system, as the proposed plan will do, can only skew things more. In the end, severe decisions about how to pay for these services in the next generation and the one after that will be even more politically divisive than today’s debate.

So, the real problem for Obama is not how to deal with overt racism or all of the name-calling, it’s really how to chart a political course in an era when most Americans view government involvement in any issue as a sure way to make things worse.

So, staying above the fray is good, it keeps his hands clean. Much more important is restoring belief that this country is actually governable. Toward that end, a botched, beaten down and toothless health care overhaul has a real chance to kill off whatever hope remains for an uplifting Obama presidency.

That’s the problem this president needs to solve, it says here.

Tonight, President Obama finally reached into his pocket and pulled out a little - perhaps a lot - of his hard-earned political currency. Tonight he put some chips into play.

It’s not as though we didn’t know he had moments like this in him. Moments like this are what got him elected. On the other hand, only the most progressive and perhaps the most naive among us believed that his persuasive power alone could change the course of history.

No, but as it turns out, that and a solid congressional majority can. Obama made it clear tonight that a bill is coming, made it clear what the bill must contain, and then offered his hand in compromise about how to get there.

And by my estimation, he went maybe ten minutes too long. In political speech-making, that’s unheard of. Bill Clinton would have overshot by 40 minutes, at least, beating us into submission.

Obama cuts like a knife. His oratorical skills are among the best since Reagan, and that’s a pretty high standard. It’s not easy to soar when you’re talking about fixing the plumbing rather than selling grand visions, and the problem with selling health care reform as a grand vision is that this center-right country sits up and asks, “government what?”

So Obama tip-toed around the vision thing, focusing more on the practical fact that health care costs are on course to bankrupt individuals as well as the national budget within a generation. He looked across the room and warned them, “You know what happens if we do nothing.”

I’ve been growing increasingly wary that Obama can be an effective president, that he can wrestle control of the dialog back from the harshest elements of the right wing, and that he can sell his programs to the American people in a way that they’ll believe and accept.

Tonight he laid down the law. He really is going to keep right on talking to us like grownups. He really is going to go right on telling secrets about what goes on in the halls of power. He really is going to keep on behaving as though his only purpose is to serve us.

The question is not, should we believe him? Let’s go ahead and say “Yes.” The question is: “Will it matter?” Are the streets of Washington so thick with the blood of ten thousand battles, that no man can come through clean? Was Obama able to reach all the way to the White House without getting blood on his own hands?

Tonight he dared Congress to join him or get run over. He managed to lecture his opponents without supplicating himself to his supporters. He was the man in the middle, the man around whom all the action is. He said, bring it to me. Bring it here.

Much like Reagan once did.

I know it’s only September of Year One. I know a fair number of people who believe that Obama is doing a fine job fending off those wascawwy wepubwicans, still a do-gooder against evil in their eyes.

I was honest throughout the campaign, and with, for example, Tavis Smiley on the eve of the election: My first reaction to Obama was that he turned me off.

Now mind you, I’m not a member of his target group. At 49 going on 50, I’m not a fresh face. Obama made his early inroads with the nation’s youngest voters, and craftily leveraged that momentum to win him some real support from the truly deep pockets. He at least kept many of them on the sidelines until he could show results in primaries, which he did, but his real success was in the caucuses, where he trounced Clinton and all other comers, giving himself a huge advantage in electorates that Clinton could only overcome by beating him that badly in the primaries, where instead they fought to a standstill.

It was brilliant primary campaign strategy. I distinctly remember that Obama himself originally thought it was too soon, but was advised by others that a change agent who didn’t have Hillary’s negatives had a real chance to overtake her, and in 2008 a Democrat was going to be elected President.

So Obama took the chance, and here is what he did with it: He went around the country repeating buzzwords, primarily Hope and Change. Every day this man’s face was on TV, repeating the same themes with absolutely no substance behind them. He’d been in national government for five minutes compared to Clinton, but he was already representing himself as the man who we needed to lead us to Hope and Change.

It didn’t even have any Sharptonian lyricism to it. In fact it was more like a professor in waiting. Or perhaps a father-figure. I’m not really sure. He talked about stature abroad and things like that, and I remember thinking, well I bet Hillary could handle that better. I kept wondering why Obama was considered more ready than Hillary to lead the country in any way.

But she lost that primary, by going on the attack. Yes, her front-runner status had been dented and her campaign was in a complete shambles, but there were other solutions. She could have asked her husband to call in some old friends and rescue Hillary’s image; hell, they’d done it before. But instead Hillary went rogue. I still remember a small skirmish when Obama used somebody else’s words without attribution, something that both men said was common between them, and the next morning there was Hillary, waving a piece of paper in the air and going on about “change you can Xerox.”

Now that could be a funny line, but coming from her it just sounded petty and irritated.

By January and the Atlanta debates, I knew this thing was over. Obama was sitting there with his jaw sticking out, legs calmly crossed, arms folded in front of him, and calmly batted away every attempt Hillary made to attack and go personal. It was clear that he was in control and she was desperate, and that’s when I knew it was over.

And so it came down to November, and I thought long and hard about a President McCain before deciding that there was too much work to be done rolling back the Bush excesses, to be trusted to a third consecutive Republican term. It truly was time for change, real change.

And to his credit, Obama did take some steps, albeit small and highly controversial, especially regarding Guantanamo and the definitions of torture. He learned early on that the idealogues who installed those policies were firmly entrenched in the political fabric of Washington and had certainly not gone away. And it should have served as a reminder that, however numerically absolute Obama’s current majority may be, it is idealogically slender and could easily be reversed, especially if his opponents are better prepared than he is. He is literally one administration against an entire machine.

Obama 1.0 has been an utter failure. The question is, can it be saved? I believe the answer is “no”. I believe that Obama 1.0 is simply the campaign formula carried into the White House. What an incredibly bad idea. You didn’t see Bush pull such a stupid stunt. He won the election, then he ran the country. Two completely different jobs.

So, kill Obama 1.0. Create Obama 2.0. It is time. It is past time.

Some essential elements of Obama 2.0:

- The everything at once strategy has got to go.

- Health care reform must wait. Use the next year to forge a true national consensus. Town hall meetings work best if you haven’t already made up your mind.

- Afghanistan must cease to be a slog. We need to be moving toward an exit strategy within a year. At most. And anyway, Al Quaeda is gone and the Taliban is greatly weakened, and a democratic government has been installed. Didn’t we already win?

- The economy is the most important focus. Specifically, making sure that every dollar spent to save the economy also, to the maximum extent possible, builds a new American future, and eventually a world future, centered around the Green Economy that Van Jones had been brought on board to champion. Obama needs to rally the nation to become the world leaders in renewable and planet-healthy technologies and advances.

The world is in a headlong rush toward its doom. The nation recognized that policies such as those espoused by the Bush Administration seemed to be pushing us closer to that doom, a head in the sand approach that recognizes only one thing: are you with me or against me? and knows only one solution: kill or be killed.

Obama would do well to remember that he is being judged on his ability to change the tone and tenor of his times. So, be the great mediator. Step to the lecturn on Wednesday and say you’re going to slow down and de-emphasize health care. That you consider health care reform essential, but that getting it right matters more than getting it quickly, that you realize that many voices want to be heard on this subject, and that they should have that chance. Now that is changing the tone and tenor.

And then please come up with a way to give Afghanistan back to its people and let them choose the government they want. Let them also understand that if they host those who intend to harm the U.S. or its allies, that we will be back, from the air, with devastating consequences. And let us look for a way forward in our Middle East policy which does not require us to choose sides in armed conflicts.

Green economy. Forward-looking foreign policy.

There’s your hope. There’s your change.

Obama 2.0. If not now, when?

BennettBlog has come into possession of the script for President Obama’s speech to Congress regarding health care on Wednesday. We can’t say how we got it. Our lives could be in danger.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, members of Congress, my fellow Americans, what a privilege it is to stand here before you, at the dawn of a new millenium, a new American age where anything is possible. And our imagination must rise to the challenge that future calls for, for we know that the excesses of the twentieth century must not be allowed to be repeated in the twenty-first.

“And so our generation, and generations to come, will be change generations. Where previous generational change was about doing things bigger and better, we must be about making things smarter and better. Speed is no longer a rare commodity; in the digital age, great ideas can come together in the historical equivalent of a nano-second.

“And so we must not fear change, for change will surely come. Rather, it’s about our ability to control that change, to chart our own destiny as a people and as a planet, and not have that destiny charted for us by the relentless march toward an unsustainable planet.

“And no, this is not my global warming speech, although that one is also coming, because if we do not learn to consider the long term consequences of our actions, then our destiny is truly a dice roll, and as most of us know, a gambler’s luck always runs out at some point.

“But before we can conquer the big stuff, like you know, saving the planet, we have to learn to handle the small stuff. You know, the stuff that is totally within our own borders, the stuff that we do already but we need to do smarter, because bigger is not better. You know, that stuff.

“Turn off the teleprompter. Turn it off. I’m going off-script.

{walks off of the lecturn and down into the well, in front of his seated audience.}

“OK, now I want one designated speaker from the left, and one from the right, and we’re gonna take turns asking and answering each others questions because this is too important. And I’m gonna stay here til they turn out the lights because I’m all about this issue. Lest we forget, we come here to help the American people. You’ve seen the numbers. You’ve seen the studies. Is this the best we can do? Is it? I want any member of this body who honestly believes that, to get up right now and walk out of this room. Go on! If you honestly believe we’ve already got the best system, well let’s see who has the more votes.

“Now the rest of you - you got your person? You got yours? - OK , now the rest of you, write your questions down and hand them to your person’s screener - you both pick a screener - and the screener will hand each spokesperson the next question. The spokesperson can also ask their own question at any time. We’ll stay as long as there’s somebody for me to talk to, and put the coffee on my tab.

“OK, who’s first?”

Ah, dreams…

I’m going to recite from memory the words that got Van Jones in so much trouble.

When asked why Republicans were able to push through an agenda with less than a super majority but Democrats seem unable to, Jones said (approximately):

Because Republicans are assholes (thunderous laughter). President Obama is not an asshole. Now, I can be a bit of an asshole. So perhaps some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama, need to get a little uppity.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it seems to me that the revolution will not be televised, just as we were warned. It’s just too difficult for people to hear things they don’t want to hear. Jones got a great response to what he said. He said a lot of other things to that audience in Berkeley, six months ago. If anything, it is surprising that it took this long for those words to gestate into political poison.

Republicans have chosen a path. It is the path of Most Resistance, and they are executing it brilliantly. They get to fight as dirty as they wanna be, not only because they are the minority party and therefore entitled to do a little “attacking”, but because they have absolutely mastered the art of getting others to do their dirty work. Notice how, already, several times, Obama himself has been declared a “racist”, for positions he has taken or words he has spoken. We want a black in the White House? We want to push back against racism? Here’s our reward: They will call us the racists.

How interesting.

But let me just say that the Van Jones resignation is just one more example of what Republicans already know: One-Term Obama has zero fight in him.

The good news for Jones is that he can now step out of the shadows. I would hope that Tavis Smiley will scoop him up for a PBS sitdown sometime soon, then Jones can write his next book and hit the lecture circuit. And he can serve as a vivid reminder that the best and brightest will never be allowed to sit too long in the halls of power, lest they make the statues too uncomfortable.