The Obama administration is just beginning, and Obama’s supporters seem to be convinced that he is about to create a worldwide renaissance in all areas of human endeavor—the environment, the economy, relations among races, nations, religions, you name it. I’ve heard my liberal friends say that finally we have a president who can bring peace to the world, one who can even change the planet’s climate. The euphoria is so absolute that it has become obvious to some of us that no one is going to be keeping track of whether any of this is really working.
Recently, I visited my old home town, Flagstaff, which has changed from an old logging, ranching, and railroad town, to one of the most liberal places I know of. On the streets of Flagstaff I saw a higher percentage of Obama bumper stickers than even in liberal Santa Barbara. Everywhere I went I heard my friends gush about Obama. That he is going to change the world was taken as a given. That I shared in this belief was taken as a given, too. I even heard people refer to him as a “Christ.” I didn’t have the heart to tell these people that I am an unbeliever. I think it would have been too ugly.
All this got me to wondering. Why are so many people, including so many conservatives, so euphoric about this relatively inexperienced and unaccomplished politician? Why do they think of him literally as a messiah? And then the thought came to me, that, in a liberal frame of reference, Obama is a messiah. A messiah is someone who absolves us of our sins. Because Obama is African-American, a vote for him absolves the voter of any guilt as a racist. Because Obama has promised to end the war in Iraq, meet with our enemies as equals, and change the image of the U. S. from a nation of war to one of peace, voting for Obama establishes the voter as a person of peace and absolves him or her of any guilt in the war against the Islamists or against anybody, anyplace, anytime.
Because Obama has vowed to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor and have the government provide health care for all, a vote for him absolves the voter of economic guilt. too. (That means you can keep flying first class and not feel guilty about it.)
Because Obama has stated that the U. S. can’t continue to usurp 25% of the world’s wealth for a mere 3% of the people without being held accountable, and because he has promised to work to end global warming, a vote for Obama absolves the voter of green guilt as well.
Imagine, ABSOLVING YOURSELF OF ALL GUILT merely by voting for a presidential candidate. No wonder Obama’s true believers are euphoric!!
This euphoria is one of the reasons that, when Rush Limbaugh was asked what will wake people up to the fact that Obama can’t deliver on all that he has promised, Limbaugh answered that they’re never going to wake up.
Another way to say that is: virtually everyone who voted for Obama, and many of the people who voted for McCain and now support Obama (even McCain supports Obama), aren’t even considering the possibility that Obama’s policies can fail.
Because flying blind in times as hazardous as these is so very, very dangerous, this inability (or unwillingness) to hold Obama accountable could get us so deep into trouble before we even realize it, that it will be very difficult for us to claw our way out of that trouble, if we can do it at all.
I’m sure there are plenty of Obama-ites who would tell me I’m totally delusional about this. That if Obama’s policies were beginning to fail, he would realize it and change. Hasn’t Obama said recently that if someone shows him a way to do anything that works better than his way he would change? And if he didn’t live up to this wouldn’t his supporters realize it and pressure him to change, and then, surely, he would do it.
One service this blog can provide is to equip its readers to help Obama keep this promise. To do that, I believe most of us need help because for some time now we have been failing to hold our politicians, bureaucrats, and other supposed leaders accountable while they were claiming to be saving the planet but really doing just the opposite—making the world and our lives worse. We hope to provide this help by equipping Obama’s supporters and his detractors with the skills to cut through the euphoria and recognize when his policies are producing the opposite of what he has promised. If “The Right Way to be Green” can provide this service, it might just play a role in saving his administration.
What this blog is about, after all, is making liberalism more accountable by pointing out that, in many cases, the policies of liberal environmentalism — environmental protection, preservation, reducing the “human footprint” — don’t make the environment better, they make it worse. In many cases they exterminate the endangered species they purport to protect, hasten the desertification they claim to reverse, and make us all worse rather than better off. Just like Obama, they do all this without being held accountable. In fact they get credit for doing just the opposite.
Here’s how: (These have all been mentioned in earlier posts).
When liberal environmentalists apparently were responsible for causing the demise of a population of a threatened fish in the Upper Verde River in Arizona, no Environmental Impact Statement was required even after government scientists had cited the policy two environmental groups had compelled the U. S. Forest Service to adopt via a threatened lawsuit (see Seeing is Believing and other previous posts) as the cause of the spikedace’s disappearance. Nor were any of the environmental groups or any of their members charged with a “taking” (killing) of a listed species, which, according to the Endangered Species Act is a federal offense that can be punished by a significant fine.
In spite of this failure, the environmental groups who were apparently responsible for the disappearance of the Verde River spikedace are still looked upon as its protectors and the policy that exterminated the little fish is still looked upon as its greatest hope of survival. In the meantime, the scientists who have said otherwise have been silenced. As for the press, if it reports anything, it reports the opposite of what has happened. And when I tell members of the environmental movement what their policies have done, as I have many times, they scoff and call me a pawn of the ranching industry and discount what I have told them or promptly forget it.
There are plenty of other instances of this phenomenon (again, which I have reported in other places in this blog). For instance, I’ve told you how the policies of liberal environmentalism have:
• Accelerated desertification of extensive areas of the American West.
• Created a preserve for an endangered bird which the bird avoids, preferring to live on a nearby cattle ranch. To add insult to injury liberal environmentalists then tried to remove the rancher from the ranch the bird preferred ostensibly in order to “protect” the bird.
• Caused the deterioration of California native grasslands by making those grasslands more vulnerable to invasive nonnatives.
• Caused the demise of unique habitats called vernal pools, which have been called the densest concentrations of threatened and endangered species on the planet.
• Caused the deterioration and near demise of native bird habitat on the Island of Kauai in the state of Hawaii.
• Caused the deterioration and near demise of one of the most valuable wetland habitats in India and resulted in the killing of nine villagers in the process.
Why would an environmental group whose primary mission is to protect endangered species end up causing the extermination of a population of one of those species and not even say “Oops,” or admit their mistake, or try to correct it? And why are they still pressing to expand the policy that caused the demise of a fish they say their mission is to protect?
After more than thirty years of experience as an environmental activist, including several years with the Sierra Club, Audubon and Earth First!, examples such as these have convinced me that the collection of activities we call “environmentalism” may appear to be about birds and fishes and ecosystems, and many of those involved in it may sincerely feel that they are personally dedicated to things that are green and growing and wild, but in the end, environmentalism is about politics, which in the end is about control.
One sure way to confirm this is to recognize the way in which environmentalists measure success. Environmental groups measure success in the number of green laws passed, regulations created, acres brought under “protective” management (administered by the government and directed by them), and in the election of politicians committed to increasing all of the above (like Barak Obama). On the Verde, for the environmental groups directly involved and those cheering from the sidelines, success was identified as removing private management from the lands along the river and placing control of those lands more securely in the hands of the government, which environmentalists are more adept at controlling than they are at controlling individual ranchers or private corporations.
All this has happened under cover of a smokescreen which protects the process from accountability and anoints it as the “right” thing to do. That smokescreen is provided by the bedrock assumption of contemporary liberal environmentalism (which most of us subscribe to): that all environmental problems are the result of human impact — more specifically the impact of human productive activity, and the only way to solve any and all of those problems is to reduce that impact, ideally to zero. Removing cattle from along the Verde reduced human productive activity on those lands and therefore returned them to “nature.” When the Verde River spikedace disappeared as a result, the enviros blamed nature, and washed their hands of the matter.
In this same way, Barak Obama is absolved of any accountability for the failure of his policies. If his energy policies cause our economy and therefore our standard of living to shrink, even catastrophically, his supporters will tell us and themselves, he is doing the right thing by reducing the human footprint on the planet and reducing our dependency on foreign oil, and the standard of living we are left with as a result is natural and good and, therefore, we shouldn’t expect anything more.
And if Obama’s plan to nationalize health care reduces the quality and availability of health care in America, as people who have lived under similar systems tell us it will, that failure, also, will be chocked up as a “success” because making health care available to all is the right thing to do, and for liberals success is a matter of installing the right (i. e. liberal) policies and whatever happens as a result is the best you have any right to expect.
If Obama’s foreign policies embolden our enemies and make us and our allies more vulnerable and more likely to be attacked, this new teflon president, who has sold himself as a “man of peace,” will not be held accountable for that either. Those unhappy consequences will be dismissed as a late payment for “the failed policies of the past” or the legacy of George Bush, or as Obama’s minister has described it, “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” and we will be told we’re getting what we deserve.
In short, Obama’s election has not only absolved us of all guilt, it has done the same for him. What that means is, most likely our circumstances will have to become very ugly to wake enough of us from our slumber to recognize that this emperor has no clothes and we have a right to try to achieve more than the sour fruit he is already trying to sell us.
Stay tuned. We’re working to help wake you as early as possible.