It is the duty of being a “pundit” to have an opinion on the events of the day and, of course, everyone has an opinion about President Obama’s State of the Union speech.
My most distinct impression while listening to it was that I had heard it all before.
It was a repeat of Obama’s 2008 campaign and a repeat of the past year’s failure to gain support for healthcare “reform” and the stalled “Cap-and-Tax” bill. It was a siren call to his fellow Democrats in Congress to continue supporting policies that will surely get them thrown out of office in October.
Some sage said that repeating the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results is a definition of insanity. I am no psychiatrist, but the narcissism that so defines Obama was on display. I kept count and he said “I” or some version of it at least 100 times in the course of the speech. He used the word “we” a lot, but that was a rhetorical “we”, not the one where we all pull together.
And we shall surely all pull together in November when we pull the lever in the voting machine for any candidate not on the Democrat Party line.
There is little to be added to the analysis of other pundits, but I did notice one particularly disturbing, albeit brief, reference to “climate change.” He wants the United States “to be a leader in the fight against climate change.”
If you recall, during the campaign Obama promised that, if elected, the seas would begin to recede. One of the more absurd claims of global warming was the massive melting of the North and South Poles, thus causing the oceans of the world to rise and swamp the coastlines of nations.
You may also recall that the President went to the Copenhagen UN Conference on Climate Change that happily resulted in nothing at all. This was a good outcome and it occurred in the wake of the release of emails between a handful of rogue climate scientists who had labored for years to distort the actual data on climate in order to further the vast global warming hoax.
The President actually said there was “overwhelming evidence” of climate change. No, but there is growing evidence that Al Gore and everyone else who said that global warming was occurring was lying or seriously misinformed.
How the President of the United States could continue to assert that global warming was or is real is beyond any rational explanation.
The President also repeated the falsehood that “investment”, i.e., taxpayer subsidies and “stimulus” cash, in “green jobs” and “clean energy” was the way out of the nation’s current economic difficulties. This is so absurd as to constitute willful deception.
About the only thing that made any sense was his passing reference to the need for more nuclear plants to generate electricity for the nation’s growing population and the need to open up exploration of the nation’s offshore reserves of oil and natural gas. The Institute for Energy Research projects that developing oil and gas reserves has the potential to create 1.2 million jobs and provide an additional $70 billion in annual wages.
Everywhere around the world, nations are cutting back on their investments in wind and solar power. It is inefficient and impractical. In a nation that has several hundred years of coal reserves, it makes sense to build some more coal-fired plants as well, given the fact that coal provides fifty percent of all the electricity we use daily.
Beyond the environmental and energy issues the President touched upon, his favorite theme was an attack on the nation’s banking and insurance industries. This no doubt derives from his Marxist outlook that sees any form of capitalism as wrong.
Finally, in an administration overflowing with former and future lobbyists, the hypocrisy of blaming them for the failure of a Congress that for decades has been mostly controlled by the Democrat Party is yet another absurdity. Lobbyists have been part of the nation’s political structure almost from the first session of Congress in 1789.
In sum, President Obama has learned virtually nothing from his first year in office. He will not be a “great one term President”, but he will be a one-term President in 2012.
