Target Audience

Paul Chesser brings us the WaPo's utter bafflement at how Armus isn't stampeding the American people into the arms of the greenstremists as Red Barry's calculated neglect was designed to guarantee:

Environmentalists say they're trying to turn public outrage over oil-smeared pelicans into action against more abstract things, such as oil dependence and climate change. But historians say they're facing a political moment deadened by a bad economy, suspicious politics and lingering doubts after a scandal over climate scientists' e-mails.

The difference between now and the awakenings that followed past disasters is as stark as "on versus off," said Anthony Leiserowitz, a researcher at Yale University who tracks public opinion on climate change.

"People's outrage is focused on BP," Leiserowitz said. The spill "hasn't been automatically connected to some sense that there's something more fundamental wrong with our relationship with the natural world," he said.

The story of 2010 is not that nothing happened after the BP spill, or after the coal-mine explosion that killed twenty-nine in West Virginia on April 5. It's that much of the reaction has focused on preventing accidents - on tighter scrutiny of rigs and mines - rather than broader changes in the use of oil and coal.

Chesser does my translating for me:

In other words, while the general public finds it reasonable and necessary to continue to access and use fossil fuels - and therefore find it reasonable and necessary to figure out how to do so safely - the environmental extremists want to dramatically alter how we use energy. That means raising costs of oil, coal and natural gas so that renewables look like a bargain by comparison.  

See, that's where "a bad economy, suspicious politics, and lingering doubts after a scandal over climate scientists' e-mails" comes in.  "Going green," like any other fad, is a product of prosperity.  Only a free and innovative economy can afford to develop the advanced technology necessary to maintain a clean environment AND continued access to plentiful and inexpensive energy resources.  When the economy undergoes a downturn, frills are among the first items to get cut back, and "save the planet" foolishness is the emptiest of self-esteem-goosing frills.

Suspicious politics is the inevitable result of the Obamidency, which lyingly promised the sun, moon, and stars, while maniacally determined to deny Us, The People, any and all means of attaining them.  Now they see a huge oil spill and the Hussein regime doing everything it can to obstruct "plugging the damn hole" and cleaning up the mess and hiding it behind press bans and even oversight of the still-lopsidedly Democrat Congress, while simultanously extorting BP and holding the entire Gulf region hostage against doing the envirowackos' bidding.

The public has been under withering attack from this occupying force for a year and a half.  "Buyer's remorse" was left behind a loooong time ago.  We've reached the pitchforks and tar & feathers stage.  Godbama's wall-to-wall hard left extremism has demolished goodwill of and any lingering trust in the Democrat Party.  We, The People, have regained some measure of adultness and level-headedness and the commonsensical logic to recognize that the exotic "green economy" that The One pines after won't exist for decades yet, and in the mean time we still need energy, and we have abundant sources right here in our own country.

Another generation has learned the TANSTAAFL lesson: "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."  They've learned that environmentalists are communist totalitarians hiding behind crass emotional manipulations.  And they've learned the hard way, just as my generation did thirty years ago, why you don't elect Democrats.

Answer: Because THEY don't need any persuading to drive the rest of us two centuries backwards economically and technologically:

The third, biggest and most contentious piece [of Lucifer's camouflaged cap & trade bill] is a price on greenhouse gas emissions — a policy at the heart of the climate change debate. In a nod to how heavy a lift this would be, it’s likely that the carbon-cap piece will be limited to pollution from power plants and will not apply across the economy.

Remember the White House plot to ram cripple & tax through after the election?  The problem with that all along has been that in order to have the time to do an ObamaCare-like cram-down, the Senate has to pass its version now, before midterm campaigning shuts down Capitol Hill for the duration.  But doing it now runs smack into the wall of endangered Rust Belt Donk senators who aren't willing to sacrifice their cushy, powerful careers to carry out the "for our own good" duty of bankrupting their states.  Maybe a year ago, they might have, particularly if O-Care had been set aside, but not with just three and a half months to go before Election Day. 

And, sure enough:

Despite that concession, it’s almost certain that two, if not three, of the five leaders meeting with Reid will object to including any kind of carbon cap in the final package. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D-WV) and Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln (D-AK) fear that a carbon price will hurt their home-state economies. And Bingaman, although a strong supporter of climate change efforts that cap carbon, has said many times in recent weeks that he does not believe the votes are there to pass a climate measure this year.

Translation: Rockefeller wants Joe Manchin in the Sheets Byrd Memorial Seat instead of Shelly Moore-Caputo; Blanche Lincoln is thirty points behind but apparently thinks she can still somehow squeak out a monster comeback in the teeth of an anti-Obama hurricane by not nuking Arkansas after committing hari-kari by voting for O-Care; and Bingaman may be insane, but he's no fool.

He's just three months behind Jim Inhofe:

Dirty Harry may make a "serious push" for this enviro-wet dream, but any serious chance of breaking a filibuster walked out the door with Lindsey Gasnesty.  And as to "muscling" through a last-second rule change abolishing the filibuster altogether....

That would, um, only take a simply majority to pull off.  But it would also pretty much clinch a Republican Senate next year which....wouldn't have the numbers to break a Donk filibuster of a C&T repeal.

Maybe yet another nightmare CAN come true.