Jealousy Thy Name is McCain: The GOP and the Punditrocracy are livid over Obama turning his world tour, which was supposed to expose his bumbling inexperience as he committed an endless string of gaffes, into a victory jaunt, the images sent back to America showing a confident and relaxed Obama at home and presidential on the world stage. As anyone who has studied Ronald Reagan’s campaigns knows, the successful image is often more important than what was said in the speeches, especially to those with the TV sound muted or who only catch a part of the news, as so many Americans do. Obama, I think intentionally, wanted to show himself as ‘The President,’ getting white America comfortable with the idea of a black man as their leader, and in that he has succeeded beyond expectations. Another aspect is the palpable tinge of jealously displayed by the McCainiacs – they well know that their withered and dull candidate couldn’t attract an adoring crowd of that size overseas and it preys on them to no end. The McCain campaign was out-played and outclassed on this one, as Globetrotter Obama vanquished the amateurish McCain team in their home court.
A Campaign Metaphor? Barack Obama goes to Berlin, Germany, and is greeted by over 200,000 cheering Germans waving US flags; John McCain goes to the German Village neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, and chows down on bratwurst and cream puffs. (Did Ron Fournier of the AP pick up the tab?) Isn’t this pretty much the prevailing zeitgeist of both campaigns: Obama’s large and in charge and McCain’s left sitting there forlornly chewing on a sausage?
Speaking of the Out-of-Touch Punditrocracy: Following Obama’s spectacular Berlin appearance, many of the cable news pundits oddly obsessed, as did NBC’s Brian “Broadcast Newshawk” Williams, on Obama admitting that McCain’s ‘surge’ in Iraq had been right and Obama had been wrong. Obama wouldn’t play their game and correctly attributed the current less violent conditions in Iraq to many factors, so they pouted that he was evading the question. As Eric Alterman at Media Matters wrote the other day, “Why is the surge being reported as an undeniable success when it still has not accomplished most of the things it was promised to do and has likely accomplished nothing that will last once its unsustainable numbers are drawn down?” But that’s the kind of question that our infatuated Big Media somehow never gets around to asking McCain. Gee, it’s a good thing we have a liberal media – imagine what they would do to Obama if they were really McCain sympathizers at heart?
The Tattlesnake — The Pickens That Ain’t Slim Edition
Let’s Stop T. Boone’s Clever Greenmail Plan
“I’m doing it for America.”
– T. Boone Pickens on his plan to wean us off of oil, as quoted by David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2008.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus9-2008jul09,0,7890733.column
“Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
“Patriotism, n. … In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.”
– Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary.”
Maybe you’ve seen the TV commercial by now: a reassuring Texas twang drones on in the background clicking off the environmental crises we face in the future as images of black clouds boiling out of smokestacks and abandoned oil derricks fill the screen. At the end of the ad, a homely man with the plain weathered face of a Steinbeck Okie tells us he’s T. Boone Pickens and admits he was an ‘oilman all his life,’ but now he’s seen the environmentally-green light and there’s no time to fiddle around – this is an ‘emergency we can’t drill our way out of’ and we have to start work today to solve our energy problems. He then informs the audience that in the next few weeks he’ll be unveiling his ‘Pickens Plan’ for sustainable energy.
The casual viewer might think: ‘Whoa, things are bad enough that a former Panhandle oilman has turned into Mr. Green Jeans, and isn’t it nice of him to come up with a plan to save us all and spend his money to promote it!’
Time to toss a big bucket of ice-cold reality on this slop: 1.) Pickens is a diehard Republican who co-funded the demented Swift Boat group that helped elect Bush in 2004, and he’s made carloads of money from the petroleum business. 2.) Rich oilmen don’t run $58 million dollar advertising campaigns unless there’s a huge profit for them at the end of the line. 3.) Pickens currently owns the largest wind farms in Texas and he’s aching to expand; he also holds leases on vast natural gas deposits, two major alternative-energy legs of his ‘Pickens Plan.’ 4.) Word is, this molasses-mouthed slickster will be trying to change Texas law – not difficult for a wealthy Republican — so that he’ll be the only wholesale dealer of wind and solar energy in the state, selling it to the various power companies there. And he plans to extend this model into other states; if successful, he’ll eventually become the largest dealer of green technology in the country. 5.) This means Pickens will be setting the price for environmentally-safe power in the future, at the expense of the rest of us.
If this sounds like the recipe for another Enron disaster, well – it is. The power may be green, but the results will be the same – screw the consumer blue.
We are going to have to convert to sustainable alternative technology if we expect to survive, but, for god’s sake, let’s keep the market from being cornered by the oily likes of known predators like T. Boone Pickens.