It’s Monday, December 12th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of George Lawlor and CommenataryMagazine.com, Peter Wehner details America’s bane:

Barack Obama, Political Hack

In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama took another stab at summarizing the philosophy of the Republican Party. And this is the best Obama could do: “Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

This is a silly and intentionally misleading statement — silly because it’s so transparently false and intentionally misleading because the president surely cannot believe his own rhetoric. (For the record, The Obamao believes in only one thing: himself.) The problem for Obama is it’s becoming a pattern. Earlier this year, he charged that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to “fend for themselves.”

After that, he told us the GOP plan is ”dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” Given his rhetorical trajectory, Obama will soon be insisting that Republicans favor reinstituting slavery at home and genocide abroad (or perhaps it’s favoring genocide at home and slavery abroad).

These are the kinds of things a politically desperate and intellectually bankrupt politician says. (And a compliant, collaborative MSM refuses to refute.) The president must believe he cannot win a debate on philosophy on the merits, so he instead employs the crudest caricatures he can.

The point is that there seems to be no limit, no check, on what Obama will say in order to demonize his opponents — or, to quote Obama’s own words, his “enemies.”

It is Obama who believes he can play by his own rules. For him, truth is increasingly beside the point. Words are merely tools to be employed in what he believes is a Great Cause. In this instance, the Great Cause happens to be his re-election, despite the fact that Obama and his team are having the darndest time articulating what exactly he would do in a second term beyond “finish the job.” (Apparently his demolition project can’t be completed in one term; it will require two.)

The great divide between conservatives and liberals today is over equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Those are serious intellectual differences to discuss, but Obama apparently wants no part of it. (Because the facts, which must form the basis of any rational discussion or debate, simply aren’t on his side!) He would rather turn his opponents into brutish, cartoon characters.

What makes all of this even more farcical is that Obama conceives of himself as a genuine intellectual, the leader of a national seminar. During his run for the presidency, Obama created an image of himself as a man thirsting for an honest, high-minded debate. He promised to “turn the page” on the old brand of politics, promised us “hope and change,” and declared, ”If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.”

It was Obama who said, ”We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism… […] That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ’not this time….’” It was Obama who in an interview declared, ”I want us to rediscover our bonds to each other and to get out of this constant petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics.” And it was Obama who said on the night of his election, on a stage in Grant Park, ”I will listen to you, especially when we disagree… […] Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long.”

But it turns out this was a mirage. (With all due respect to Mr. Wehner, which is considerable, only if “mirage” is another word for “bald-faced lie”!) The fact that Obama’s presidency has been a failure and that he is so manifestly inept in his current role has turned him into a fairly unprincipled (and remarkably uncreative) political hack. He has succumbed to his uglier impulses. He wouldn’t be the first president to do so. The same thing happened to Richard Nixon and to Jimmy Carter, who started out as a decent man and ended up as a petty one.

The whole thing is a shame. To watch a presidency fall apart can be a poignant thing; and to watch a president dishonor himself in the process can be a sad one.

Call us callous, consider us cold….but the tears just ain’t a comin’!  John Steele Gordon offered the following in response to Wehner’s column:

As Pete points out, Obama’s Osawatomie speech was flagrantly dishonest as to what Republicans stand for. In the president’s view, one is either a big-government liberal or Ebenezer Scrooge.

But presenting a pathetic caricature of his political opponents was not the president’s only venture into the murkier depths of mendacity in that speech. He lied about economic history with abandon, too.

As Investor’s Business Daily writes, “One thing is certainly true about President Obama. No matter how many times people point out the falsehoods in his speeches, he just keeps making them. Case in point: his latest ‘economic fairness’ address.”

Among the shameless whoppers he peddled (IBD points out no fewer than five) was the idea that tax cuts and deregulation have “never worked” to grow the economy. Ummm, exactly what planet was Barack Obama resident on during the Reagan presidency? It saw 1) tax cuts, 2) deregulation (started under that notorious let-’em-eat-cake right-winger Jimmy Carter​ ), and 3) the greatest boom in American history, which would carry the Dow Jones Industrial Average from under 1,000 to over 14,000 in 25 years. There was a net of 21 million jobs created in the 1980s, the greatest time of job creation in American history. We added an economy the size of Germany’s to the one we already had in those years.

He also said there was weak regulation under George W. Bush, with little oversight. Then what, exactly, did the people who made up the 42 percent increase in federal regulatory personnel during the Bush years do, cut out paper dolls, solve crossword puzzles?

I agree with Pete that this is a sign of desperation. All politicians are “parsimonious with the truth” now and then and engage, in Winston Churchill’s wonderful phrase, in “terminological inexactitude.” They don’t say black is white if they have something better to say.

Of course Obama knows the mainstream media will not report the fact that he is lying to the American people. But that doesn’t matter so much with the Internet and YouTube. As Dan Rather discovered to his career-ending chagrin in 2004, lies get exposed pretty quickly and widely these days.

In a related item, Jonah Goldberg describes….

Obama: Man on a Mission

In 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama insisted that the coming presidential primary and general election campaigns “shouldn’t be about making each other look bad, they should be about figuring out how we can all do some good for this precious country of ours. That’s our mission.”

“And in this mission,” he continued, “our rivals won’t be one another, and I would assert it won’t even be the other party. It’s going to be cynicism that we’re fighting against.”

I guess I missed the moment when Obama hung his “Mission Accomplished” banner. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks more like the president not only lost his battle against cynicism, he defected to the other side.

In his remarks this week in Osawatomie, Kan. — the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1910 “new nationalism” speech — Obama laid out the themes for his re-election campaign. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denies it was an “election speech,” but Obama’s own campaign manager, Jim Messina, touted it as one in a fundraising email.

But such is the way of this White House. Facts are dependent variables, history the president’s Pool of Narcissus, reflecting his own glory. Hence, Obama cherry-picks TR’s “new nationalism” as a justification for his own agenda and proof that today’s Republicans are extreme.

After all, was not TR a “Republican son of a wealthy family,” as Obama put it? Well, yes, he was. And then, he wasn’t. TR left the Republican Party to promote his new nationalism philosophy and run as a Progressive – a “super socialist,” in the words of The New York Times in 1913.

As a Republican president, Roosevelt had been a “trust buster.” As Progressive gadfly, Roosevelt believed in making the trusts bigger, stronger and more entwined with the federal government, orchestrated by an all-powerful “Federal Bureau of Corporations.” “Concentration, co-operation and control,” he explained in his acceptance speech at the 1912 Progressive convention, “are the key words for a scientific solution of the mighty industrial problem which now confronts this nation.”

It’s no surprise Obama would find the progressive Teddy so reasonable. Nor is it shocking that Obama would fail to explain to today’s generation the true intentions of that “Republican son of a wealthy family.” (Many of who, thanks to a Liberal education establishment dedicated to the ignorance of the electorate, don’t know the first thing about Teddy Roosevelt.)

And no wonder Obama thinks that low tax rates in the 1920s were a significant cause of the Great Depression. Or that he sees income inequality as the chief problem during the 1930s — and today. “Now, this kind of inequality — a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression — hurts us all,” he declared. “When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, when people are slipping out of the middle class, it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom.”

Except inequality isn’t the cause of these problems, stagnating wages and unemployment are. But Obama wants to talk about inequality because it puts him on the convenient side of populist anger.

Sounding as if he’s still running against George W. Bush, Obama laid the blame for our problems on the “most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history.” Of course, he leaves out that those tax cuts also went to the middle class.

He also forgets his own favorite metric of jobs “created or saved.” It’s a bogus, unprovable gimmick, used to defend his failed stimulus, but who is he to say Bush’s tax cuts didn’t save millions of jobs after 9/11?

Obama describes the Bush years as a libertarian dystopia of “‘you’re on your own’ economics,” when we ignored vital spending on things like education and poverty programs. This is Obama’s favorite straw man, and he’s a kung fu master when it comes to defeating it.

He leaves out that Europe already has his preferred policies and is about to go under. More significantly, Obama leaves out that under “compassionate conservatism,” Bush was the first president to spend more than 3 percent of GDP on anti-poverty programs. Under Bush, federal spending on education grew 58 percent faster than inflation. Obama forgets that Bush fought for the biggest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society (Medicare Part D). He airbrushes away Sarbanes-Oxley, a new Cabinet agency, faith-based initiatives, etc.

“Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent,” Obama barked. “That is the height of unfairness.” Except, when the Washington Post asked the White House for evidence to support the claim, an official confessed they “had no actual data to back up the president’s assertion.”

That’s OK. Who cares about the facts when you’re fighting to make America safe for cynicism again?

Keep in mind, this is just the prelude; the REAL battle has yet to joined.  When 2012 political conflict begins in earnest, it will make the sparring to date seem like an episode of The Brady Bunch.  And the farther The Obamao falls in the polls, the lower his campaigning will sink in the gutter.

Then there’s this from the “Where Have We Heard THIS before?!?” segment, courtesy of another stellar performer in the Team Tick-Tock line-up:

Nuclear Panel Members Have ‘Grave Concerns’ About Chairman

First there was the strawberries….then they were all against me!

And in International News of Note:

North Korea Threatens South Over Christmas Lights

North Korea warned South Korea on Sunday of “unexpected consequences” if Seoul displays Christmas lights near the tense border, and vowed to retaliate for what it called “psychological warfare.” The South’s defense ministry said earlier it was considering a request by a Seoul church group to put up Christmas lights on a steel tower shaped like a tree atop a military-controlled hill near the border.

The North’s official website, Uriminzokkiri, called the plan “a mean attempt for psychological warfare” against the communist state and threatened to retaliate immediately if the lights are switched on. The North has previously accused the South of displaying Christmas lights to spread Christianity among its people and soldiers.

Gee….North Korea truly IS a Democratic republic!

Turning next to News of No Use, we learn….

Virginia Tech Shooter Had Visited Gun Range, Friend Says

The truly sad part about this headline is it’s still more useful than 99% of what Joe Biden’s ever said.

And in the Environmental Moment, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for this special report from Durban, South Africa:

U.N. Climate Conference Reaches Hard-Fought Agreement

A U.N. climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement Sunday on a far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change.

The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would ensure that countries will be legally bound to carry out any pledges they make. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest.

The deal doesn’t explicitly compel any nation to take on emissions targets, although most emerging economies have volunteered to curb the growth of their emissions. (Most, if not all of which, have INCREASED rather than DECREASED their emissions since the signing of Kyoto.)

Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for at least another five years under the accordadopted Sunday — a key demand by developing countries seeking to preserve the only existing treaty regulating carbon emissions.

Global Warming and Adaptability

Any carbon deal to replace Kyoto would have a negligible impact on climate in coming decades.

The Durban pit-stop in the endless array of climate summits has just ended, and predictably it reaffirmed the United Nations’ strong belief that the most important response to global warming is to secure a strong deal to cut carbon emissions.

What is almost universally ignored, however, is that if we want to help real people overcome real problems we need to focus first on adaptation.

The Durban agreement is being hailed as a diplomatic victory. Yet it essentially concedes defeat, leaving any hard decisions to the far end of the decade when other politicians will have to deal with it. For nearly 20 years, the international community has tried to negotiate commitments to carbon cuts, with almost nothing to show for it.

Even most rich countries don’t want to cut fossil fuels, because the alternatives are considerably more expensive. China, India and other emerging economies certainly do not want to, because putting the brakes on growth means consigning millions to poverty.

But even if such intractable issues could be magically resolved, any deal would have a negligible impact on climate. Even if we were to cut emissions by 50% below 1990-levels by 2050—an extremely unrealistic scenario—the difference in temperature would be less than 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit in 2050.

This goes against everything that carbon campaigners tell us. When Hurricane Katrina or other weather disasters devastate communities, we’re told by advocates such as Al Gore that the effects of climate change are already being felt and it’s time to commit to drastic carbon cuts.

It is worth noting that often these arguments are exaggerated for effect. Since Hurricane Katrina, the global accumulated cyclone energy index has declined to almost the lowest level since we started measuring such phenomena in the early 1970s. Global warming will probably make hurricanes slightly stronger but slightly less frequent, leaving the overall impact murky.

What we can say clearly is that if we want to help New Orleans or other at-risk areas, cutting emissions will have virtually no impact for many decades. Bolstering hurricane defenses through improved levees and wetlands could, however, make a world of difference.

This is even more true for hurricane impacts in Third World countries. When Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, it cost 10% of the state’s GDP and killed 41 people. But when the similar-sized Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras, it cost the country two-thirds of its GDP and killed more than 10,000. Tackling hurricane impacts in developing countries is not about cutting carbon but about adaptation and economic growth to improve resilience.

This is true whether we look at hurricanes or at other problems exacerbated by global warming. It is often—correctly—pointed out that global warming will hit developing countries hardest. Malaria cases, for instance, will increase along with mosquito populations, while food production in many developing countries will decrease.

But getting an emissions deal in any of the future Durban meetings will do nothing to help either of these problems. Even if we halted global warming by the end of the century, we could expect to avoid only about 3% of world-wide malaria cases by 2100. What the billions afflicted by malaria in the world today need is access to treatment and better prevention through bed-nets and indoor spraying. This is adaptation.

When it comes to access to food, global warming is expected to be responsible for a 7% yield decrease in the developing world and a 3% yield increase in the developed world over this century. Yet this needs to be seen in the context of total developing world food production rising by about 270% over the same period.

Do we better help the developing world by making drastic carbon cuts today that might—in an ideal world—avoid a 7% yield drop, or by making higher-yielding varieties of crops available that could potentially generate drastic yield increases? These are questions we have to answer if we are to adapt to the reality of global warming in this century.

The first step in focusing on adaptation is measuring it. The Global Adaptation Institute, led by former World Bank Managing Director Juan Jose Daboub, publishes the Global Adaptation Index, which shows how vulnerable countries are to global warming and how prepared they are to tackle it. The challenge lies not merely in reducing vulnerability but also in getting the structures in place so governments and investors can tackle adaptation in the most effective manner possible. The good news is we can improve lives today while building the crucial infrastructure needed for tomorrow.

The climate will continue changing throughout this century. And we do need to fix carbon emissions smartly through technological innovation. But if our concern is with saving lives and helping the planet’s most vulnerable populations, then we need to focus first on how we can build more resilient, adaptable communities.

Anthropogenic global warming hasn’t injured, let alone killed, a single person; since Rachel Carson spawned the Environazi movement and halted the use of DDT, malaria has killed more innocents in the Third World than Stalin, Hitler and Mao….combined.  Tell us again who and what we should be fighting?!?

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll wrap things up with the Wide, Wild World of Sports, where we learn:

Joe Paterno Fractures His Pelvis for Second Time

Magoo