Category Archives: Democrats

Blasting Big Oil

Democrats, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights

Another front on which “conservatives” have joined forces with the Democratic berserkers is in placing the blame for gas prices on the oil companies. Not on government, God forbid—it has spent us into oblivion, causing the dollar’s devaluation, and, consequently, the prices of all commodities to rise. No sirree. Like Obama and Clinton, dittoheads lay in to “Big Oil.”

Do me a favor; leave off that bogus bugbear.

Exxon Mobil and the rest have done a smashing job of bringing a product to market despite the fact that they’ve not been allowed to build a refinery for 25 years. Who has outlawed drilling in the arctic tundra or off the coast of California and Florida?

Not one nuclear power plant has been constructed since Three Mile Island. That’s due to the energetic efforts of your government and the environmental antediluvian interests it heeds. But chiefly government. Why? Because it has a duty to say “no” to the anti-civilization lobby. (McCain is a pinko to rival all pinkos when it comes to understanding energy.)

To the list of our government’s energy infractions, Pat Buchanan, in Day of Reckoning, adds the tearing down of “great dams like Hoover and Grand Coulee.”

Reduced supply and increased demand means higher prices. Cheer a Democrat-led attack on oil companies and you’ll be penalizing their ability to bring gas to market. Lines around the block will ensue.

Writing in the New York Times, Ben Stein deconstructed the “Us vs. Them” myth of oil ownership, also a component in the demonization of “Big Oil”:

“First, Exxon Mobil, like all the other gigantic integrated energy companies in this country, is owned not by a cabal of reactionary businessmen holding clandestine meetings in a lodge in the Texas scrublands (as Oliver Stone so brilliantly illustrated in “Nixon”).

Exxon Mobil, in fact, is owned mostly by ordinary Americans. Mutual funds, index funds and pension funds (including union pension funds) own about 52 percent of Exxon Mobil’s shares. Individual shareholders, about two million or so, own almost all the rest. The pooh-bahs who run Exxon own less than 1 percent of the company.

When Exxon Mobil earns almost $12 billion in a quarter, or $41 billion in a year, as it did in 2007, that money does not go into the coffers of a few billionaire executives quaffing Champagne in Texas. It goes into the pension and retirement accounts of ordinary citizens. When Exxon pays a dividend, that money goes to pay for the mortgages and oxygen tanks and in-home care of lots of elderly Americans.

So, Mr. Obama, which union pension plans — and which blue-collar workers who benefit from them — will be among the first you would like to deprive of the income that flows from Exxon’s rich dividends?

When Mr. Obama or his Democratic rival, my fellow Yale Law School graduate Hillary Rodham Clinton, go after the oil companies and want to take away their profits, they are basically seeking to lower the income of the ordinary American. Why do that? It’s just cutting off one end of a blanket and sewing it to the other.”

Red/Blue Split In The Democratic Party

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008, Hillary Clinton

An analysis of the divided democrats by the always-edifying William Schneider, CNN senior political analyst:

Well, we are seeing a red/blue split in the Democratic Party, and that could create a serious problem as we head towards the general election.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SCHNEIDER (voice over): You’ve heard about the red/blue divide in American politics. Barack Obama condemns Republicans for exploiting it.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: … to slice and dice this country into red states and blue states, blue collar and white collar, white, black, brown, young, old, rich, poor.

SCHNEIDER: Well, it’s happening already inside the Democratic Party. Barack Obama is winning the blue Democrats, young voters, upscale urban professionals, well-educated liberals and African-Americans.

Hillary Clinton is getting the red Democrats — seniors, whites, blue collar and rural voters, and more conservative Democrats. The split has gotten bigger since Clinton became a gun-toting, whiskey- drinking, street-fighting, tax-cutting populist.

SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D-NY), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And I know how hard you’re working, working for yourselves and working for your families. And I will never stop fighting for you.

SCHNEIDER: In Indiana, nearly half the Democratic primary voters said they have a gun in their household. They voted for Clinton. And the half of Democrats who did not own a gun? They voted for Obama.

Red versus blue means left versus right. In Indiana, lost liberal Democrats to Obama. They are the blue voters. Clinton and Obama split the moderates. Conservatives, or red Democrats, voted heavily for Clinton.

This is the first time this year we have seen such a sharp ideological division among Democratic voters. The deeper that split becomes, the greater the risk to Democrats in the fall if Obama wins the nomination. Among Clinton voters in North Carolina on Tuesday, fewer than half said they would support Obama over McCain, whereas 70 percent of Obama voters said they would vote for Clinton over McCain.

SCHNEIDER: Red Democrats, older, more blue collar, more conservative, are the most likely to vote for a Republican in the fall.

Updated: Michelle’s No Belle

Barack Obama, Democrats, Education, Reason

I suspect I’ll be proven correct down the line when it’s discovered that the militant Michelle Obama was a big motivator in her husband’s racial radicalization. As I’ve written, “to me, Obama has always seemed a reluctant recruit to racial politics; driven more by expediency and fear—fear of his overbearing wife and the Reverends Jackson, Sharpton,” and Wright, of course.

The more I hear Michelle, the less I like this rather handsome, Amazon-like, statuesque woman. She’s both belligerent, banal, and not very bright.

And, at every opportunity, Mrs. Obama rabbits about “our under-funded school system.”

Wrong. “The education system is a hog of huge proportions. In 1890, ‘annual current spending per pupil was $275.’ In 1999-2000, it was $7,086. ‘Adjusted for inflation and expressed in year 2000 dollars,’ that’s ‘25-fold.’ If GDP has since increased on average by only 1.9 percent per year, the spending on education has outpaced it, increasing 3 percent per year.”

“Simultaneously, the student-to-teacher ratio has been declining – there are ever more teachers compared to the number of students. One of the union’s goals is to pile on the personnel – this means more members and more union dues. Consequently, the teacher-to-student ratio is now down to an astonishing 1:16.5. (Include non-teaching staff, and there is now one adult for every eight or nine children in government schools.)”

Much to the approval of menstrual media interviewing her, Mrs. Obama recently shared another of her unmoored yearnings. She had been praising her poor little girls. You know, the tiny mites suffering for daddy and mommy’s ambitions. The prolix Mother Obama waxed on expressing the hope that we could all become more like children in their eternal equanimity and wisdom. (Okay, she didn’t put it quite like that; I’ve said she’s not very intelligent.)

Michelle’s “notion of childhood innocence” and wisdom is Rousseauist rubbish—as “fresh” and “new” as the ideas Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed in Emile, according to which
“‘[T]here is no original perversity in the human heart’ and children were naturally good, perverted only by society.”

As I’ve observed, “Government schools [do help] produce misguided, mediocre and frightfully monolithic minds.” Michelle’s is one.

Update (May 7): back in March of 2007 and again early this year, I voiced my sense of Michelle Obama as the woman who steered Obama in the direction of Wright and other crackpots. Christopher Hitchens is coming to the same conclusion: Mrs. Obama is a radical fool, who’ll have considerable sway in the White House:

“I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she’s much influenced by the definition of black “separationism” offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa’s most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, “You can’t say ‘Never Again’ to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you’re there forever.” I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can’t go on much longer without an answer to the question: “Are we getting two for one?” And don’t be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it’s too late to ask.”

Steve Sailer disagrees.

Reverend Wright Revolts Once Again

Barack Obama, Democrats, Race, Racism, The Zeitgeist

CNN televised Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This lunatic’s delivery left the limited Rick Sanchez, front man for CNN, gasping. But then, his colleagues, chiefly Soledad O’Brian, whom Wright endorsed during his rant, put him at ease. Wright’s sermon was light, fun, humorous, designed to show the totality of this much-maligned preacher. She and colleague Roland Martin were dressed in Homer Simpson-type mumus or caftans for the solemn occasion. Fix News’ retards—Geraldo Rivera and his “analytical entourage”—echoed Soledad’s solidarity with Wright.

Having listened to Wright’s insane sermon, I can only marvel at mainstream media’s ability to shed darkness on whatever topic they tackle—an ability that comes with a great deal of God-given stupidity.

Other than stark raving mad, Wright’s delivery was dripping with bile. He is a cynical, smug, sardonic so-and-so. Love? Compassion? His is the strident voice of racial grievance. And envy. The man is green with envy. His sheer envy of “European” achievements is palpable. Why else would he devote an entire hour to listing “European” achievements, deriding them, and then defining an inability to emulate these achievements as nothing but difference? Wright also latched on to fashionable brain bifurcation balderdash—he puts great stock in right brain/left brain discredited pop pedagogy—to explain black dereliction and drop-out rates. (So does Mike Huckabee)

The entire sermon was dominated by collectivist racial theorizing:

Black children learn a certain way, speak a special way and think in ways different to whites, said Wright. African music is different from European music, and here the holy man emitted a caterwauling which was supposed to come off as a cantata. The emulation was derisive, mocking. To contrast the so-called pomposity of the cantata, the MF launched into Brother musical mode, jovial and jolly. Black music was different, not deficient, to white music, said he. The one, he implied, was filled with Joie de vivre, the other just jejune.

Wright even attempted to distinguish typical white from black chords or timing. What a moron. Classical music— certainly Bach—showcases time signature fluctuations—the kind that require a high level of musicianship.

Again, undergirding this disturbing diatribe was the man’s contention that different is not deficient. And when it comes to evaluating cultural products, there is no such thing as objective standards. Naturally, it is in the interest of Wright to declare BB King as good as, only different from, Bach, because, well, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Mahler—they’re sublime. BB King is very small compared to these giants. For obvious reasons, Wright would like to encourage the Zeitgeist on the path it has embarked on in abolishing all objective standards by which learning, accomplishments, and cultural products are judged.

This Afrocentric racial “theorist” aims to instill racial pride in Africans by conjuring contempt for “European” culture. This has been his mission for decades—at least for the duration Barack Obama spent in the pews of Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama’s mind must be full of this empty incitement.