Hope, Change & Malaise

What do you do when you are running for the office of president of the United States and are basing your entire candidacy on an impossible scam?  When you are expecting to con the American people into voting for you based upon the "historic" nature of your campaign as the first African American to have a bona fide chance to attain the nation's highest office?  When you believe that you can skate your stratospheric hauteur, empty resume, and Marxist/Leninist/racist ideological upbringing courtesy of mentors like Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, Bernadette Dohn, et al past the electorate behind a fog of "hopeandchange" gobbledygook, an alleged personal charisma, and an avalanche of rock-star treatment-cum-in-kind campaign contributions from the "tingling" Enemy Media?

You do what Barack Hussein Obama has done over the past five months: gaffe and flip-flop your way all over the national stage; with each self-diminishment grow more boorish, classistly insulting, and racially overbearing; and embrace your inner Bolshevik tighter and tighter.

The latter has manifested itself no more gapingly than on energy policy.  Politico summed it up thusly:

The three main components of Obama’s plan are:

— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads within six years.

— Require that 10% of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term – more than double the current level.

—Reduce U.S. demand for electricity 15% by 2020.

Perhaps BO can get a million plug-in hybrids, with the big-ass trunks they'll need welded onto them to hold the hundreds of miles of extension cord that'll have to come with them, on American streets by 2014, provided he plans to subsidize a like number of tow-trucks to subsequently remove the ludicrous hulks when they block and gum up real traffic.  But if he means actually getting people to purchase and drive them, he might have a bigger challenge than he imagines.

Ditto the 10% "renewable" energy requirement.  There's a reason, after all, why renewables only account for 4% of our energy sources, and it's not Big Oil conspiracism.  Solar and wind and geothermal and "synthetic" fuels simply are not efficient, affordable, or practical enough for mass use, or they would ALREADY be in mass use.  It's like trying to milk a bull - in the end you won't get any milk and....well, you might make a happy bull temporarily, but eventually he'll get annoyed.  Plus, of course, those "renewable" sources are even less practical for transportation purposes, which is why Lucifer wants to force us all out of our cars and onto bicycles, crazy cars, and hippety-hops.

In practice this will not mean more energy from "renewables," but huge restrictions on the use of fossil fuels (and nuclear) in order to make the numbers come out.  Now one would think that such restrictions would have a dire impact upon the American economy, plunging it into a more or less permanent recession.  Which helps explain that third bullet point of cutting American electricity demand by 15% in the next twelve years.  He casts that one in the context of "energy efficiency," but in any kind of practical terms it would take little short of a self-inflicted economic collapse to impact power useage THAT much - all the more so when you remember the million plug-in hybrids the Chosen One wants on the road in half that time.  I'm guessing that increasing demand for hamsters and hamster wheels is the unspoken fourth Obama energy policy plank, as I don't see where else the juice will be coming from.

Obama unveiled this crazy Bolshevist plot on Monday.  On Tuesday he continued to tout it, and even cited California as his shining example of what American energy policy should look like.

Does he, or anybody in his organization, have the slightest recognition of what life in California was like under that sort of policy?  Ensign Ed does:

Let’s emulate California?  First, California didn’t cut their demand; they only kept it from increasing.  Next, people may remember how well California’s energy policy worked over the last two decades.  The aging infrastructure, price mandates, and botched privatization led the state into years of rolling blackouts, where utilities simply cut off supply in order to compensate for an inability to meet demand.  Governor Gray Davis got recalled from office over the issue, but the blackouts continued for years afterward. [emphasis added]

That last little detail is why I find it beyond astonishing that the Golden Child is openly championing such destructive nonsense.  Really, has he lost his mind?  I don't know what it would take to cause a Democrat to lose California's fifty-five Electoral Votes, but telling them that you're going to take the disastrous energy policy that was inflicted on them as recently as five years ago and force it on the nation at large might just do the trick.  This isn't like the parallels to Jimmy Carter, which was, after all, thirty years ago and not within the living memory of any voter much under the age of forty-five.  We're talking about THIS DECADE; Gray Davis was sacked only five years ago.  Or is Barack Hussein Obama's arrogance erecting such a thicket of conceit around him that it is convincing him that he can sell the American public - which, on balance, is considerably to the right of the denizens of the not-so-Golden State - on a permanent energy crisis that even the latter rejected?

Amazingly, the answer appears to be "yes":

The man who made the absurd claim that timely tuneups and proper tire inflation could, by his own implication, save twelve million barrels of oil a day (our current rate of oil importation which could easily be covered by drilling in Alaska, on the outer continental shelves, and tapping the vast oil shale deposits in the Mountain West) calls the rest of us "ignorant" for ridiculing his ridiculous assertion, on the dishonest grounds that we're claiming it wouldn't save any gasoline at all.  There's a guy who has lost his last thin, tenuous remnant of public relations acuity with the citizenry not yet herded by main force into Obamanation.

His latest campaign ad is a little more circumspect (which is to say, dishonest) about it, but not by much:

That "thousand dollar tax cut" is nothing of the kind, but rather a hand-out directly confiscated from energy industry profits he deems "excessive".  Profits that could be reinvested in energy exploration and R&D if the federal government would scrap its greenstremist prohibitions against developing our REAL domestic energy resources.  Which, of course, False Messiah has no intention of doing.

I'll let Mr. Morrissey deliver the coup de grace:

This sounds like a Luddite philosophy, an energy-hostile policy regardless of its source or its benefits.  Obama wants America to live in a shortage economy, where we become ever more dependent on government to ration energy and in which our standard of living decreases year after year.  Obama talks about Hope, but he’s really selling Despair … and it has started to lose whatever luster it ever had as his energy policies come more into focus.

I'll ask the question again: Is a majority of the American electorate REALLY going to vote for this babbling Bolshevik?