Bailouts were not limited to Wall Street, of course. In fact, once President Bush had persuaded Congress to give the big bailouts to the big banks and brokerage houses, the inevitable happened. Everyone in need ran to the trough. Some of the first at the government teat were the big automakers from Detroit.
My wife and I had been loyal customers of GM cars exclusively for thirty-five of the forty years our marriage. The bailout changed that. I was beyond disappointed—I was angry that not only would I be making payments on my vehicles to GM, but that the tax dollars I coughed up to the “goodfellows” at the IRS would then be given to those same car companies some more. The standing joke (not so funny) was that GM now stood for “Government Motors.”
In October 2013, President Obama seemed to have blurred the lines of common sense and political rhetoric when he tried to compare individual citizens to GM. It might just be the former college lecturer in him, but President Obama doesn’t speak to his audiences so much as lecture at them. And sometimes, his lectures get so high-and-mighty, they bust loose and float away from reality. For instance, in December 2013, he compared America to its individual citizens. He said neither a nation nor a person should risk their credit rating, and for Congress not to pay the interest on the debt would be like thinking you’re saving money by not paying your mortgage. He said if you don’t pay your mortgage, “you’re just a deadbeat.”
And I couldn’t help thinking: wait a minute. Isn’t this the President who created a huge federal bailout to help people who borrowed more than they could afford and couldn’t pay their mortgages? And his own program wouldn’t even help those who sacrificed and kept up their mortgage payments. You had to stop paying and go into default before you qualified for help. And the cost of that bailout was added to the debt, and is now part of the reason why we have to raise the debt ceiling again. Where was all this tough love when he was running for office? I don’t recall him ever giving a speech where he told upside-down homeowners, “Serves ya right, deadbeats.”
Theories as to the problems in the Republican Party are as numerous as the suspects in an old Perry Mason show. We hear it’s because they won’t support Obamacare or gun control or immigration reform or gay marriage or abortion. But the problem with Republicans is not that they refuse to move farther left and become calorie-free Democrats. It’s that they’ve forgotten to respect and reach out to the people who really make this country work—and here’s a hint: It’s not the guys in the big corner offices.
My wife and I were at Fenway Park in the summer of 2013, and I was watching the peanut and hot dog vendors, carrying heavy loads up and down the steps in the heat. When I see them, I see what makes America great: people working hard for a living, so that one day, they can be the ones in the seats. People who work with their hands have a gift. I can’t fix a car or an air conditioner, and the people who can are valuable. Republicans need to communicate why Big Government and high taxes hurt the guys who are building the skyscraper, not just the guy who owns it. They need to explain why educational choice gives the kids of working single moms the same opportunities as kids going to the finest private schools. They need to make it clear what the Democrats’ energy policies are costing people at the gas pumps and in their electric bills.
I grew up having a lot more in common with the people working in the kitchen than those sitting at the head table. If Republicans can explain to the waitstaff at the GOP fundraisers how conservative policies will help them, then they won’t have to worry so much about the people who paid $10,000 a plate. Don’t begrudge the underemployed family food stamps, and then justify bailouts for AIG, Goldman Sachs, and GM. The GOP’s problem isn’t that it’s too conservative. It’s convincing the masses and the majority that they aren’t invisible.
13
Environmentalist Hypocrisy
THERE’S PROBABLY NO OTHER ISSUE that chafes the chaps of people in God, guns, grits, and gravy territory like environmental extremism. These are the folks who actually live on farms and ranches, where understanding fluctuations in weather patterns is a life-or-death skill. They know about “communing with animals” because they get up before dawn every day to milk the cows, feed the chickens, and, on occasion, play midwife to a horse. They’re well aware of the conditions of marshes, waterways, and forests because they spend as much time as possible right in the middle of them, hunting and fishing (and knowing that despite what the EPA says, the mud puddle in their driveway or a ditch that’s dry except in times of gulley rusher rains are not “wetlands”). They know that meat comes from animals, not from a Styrofoam tray, and that vegetables are pulled out of a garden, not a freezer. A group of schoolchildren in New York City were asked where milk came from. Most of them answered, “The store.” They had no idea that a cow was involved. The Bubbas understand, even if the Bubble-ville elites don’t, that humans are not the enemy of the natural world, but part of the natural world. They also understand that the word “conservative” derives from the same root as “conservation,” and that it’s their duty to be good stewards of the Earth that God has blessed them with so they can pass it on to their children and grandchildren.
When that’s the way you’ve been brought up since you were knee-high to a duck (or a duck hunter), it’s infuriating to be lectured about how you are destroying the planet when the one accusing you is an environmental pressure group attorney who lives in a Manhattan town house, whose bare feet haven’t touched grass since he dropped his joint in college, and whose idea of getting close to nature is to let the nanny use the Prius to take the kids to Central Park.
Another leading source of noxious gas is Hollywood, which routinely burns vast amounts of gasoline, jet fuel, and smoke-producing pyrotechnics in order to make movies that harangue average Americans to stop their evil polluting ways. One classic example of the hypocrisy is the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach. To film their cautionary tale about how man destroys a tropical beach paradise, the filmmakers found an actual pristine beach in Thailand, then set out to make it look even more “paradise-y” by moving some sand dunes and clearing away grass and coconut trees. Some Thai officials, along with 20th Century Fox, landed in the Thailand Supreme Court for damaging the environment with their environmental message movie. Ironically, the case finally made it to court two years after the 2004 tsunami wiped away all the moviemaker’s “improvements” and reminded everyone of just what Mother Nature thinks about man’s hubris in believing he can control the Earth’s environment.
I freely admit that I am doing my part to destroy the atmosphere by flying on commercial airliners, often several times a week. This is a big no-no with the environmentalist lobby, which believes that nothing is worse than commercial jetliners spewing CO2 into the upper atmosphere. It doesn’t occur to them that there is something that might be harder to justify for an environmentalist: private jets carrying a handful of environmentalist celebrities and showbiz moguls instead of 200 or more passengers. But wait, they cry, commercial airliners are worse because they’re giant, fuel-guzzling aircrafts. You mean like the Boeing 707 owned and piloted by environmentalist celebrity John Travolta?
Please understand, I don’t mean to pick on Vinnie Barbarino. If he can afford to tote his family around in a jet that was made to carry up to 189 passengers—and which is merely the largest of the five jets he owns—then congratulations to him for achieving the American Dream. Maybe it’s just the Hollywood version of buying the biggest model Winnebago. (Come to think of it, some movie stars are known for their gigantic luxury dressing room motor homes; I’ve heard Will Smith has the most incredible one of all, costing $2.5 million and about the size of an ocean liner. Wonder how many miles to the gallon that baby gets.) But please spare us the lectures about how the rest of us need to reduce our carbon footprints when, as the British government estimated, Travolta’s flying generated over 800 tons of CO2 in one year, creating a “carbon footprint” nearly 100 times greater than that of the average British citizen.
Trav
olta admitted that maybe he wasn’t the best spokesman for cutting back on CO2 emissions. But like all environmentalist hypocrites, he had a good excuse: “I use [jets] as a business tool, though, as others do. I think it’s part of this industry—otherwise I couldn’t be here doing this and I wouldn’t be here now” [Daily Mail, “With Five Private Jets, Travolta Still Lectures on Global Warming,” March 30, 2007]. Not as if noncelebrities didn’t also have good reasons for getting where they need to go.
Like Oliver Hardy exasperated with Stan Laurel, environmental activists fumed at Travolta, “Stop trying to help us!” They blasted him for setting a bad example by preaching against flying while taking unnecessary flights himself. Funny they should mention that!
Probably the best-known environmental pressure group in the world is Greenpeace. That organization launched a campaign to convince people to reduce air travel to curb climate change. So it was pretty embarrassing when the Guardian newspaper revealed that one of the group’s top European executives lived in Luxembourg and commuted to work a couple of times a month to Amsterdam by jet. The paper estimated that over the two years he’d held the job, the Greenpeace executive’s commute had generated 7.4 metric tons of CO2.
At the risk of giving you déjà vu, I should note that Greenpeace, too, had a feeble excuse. They insisted that the poor fellow felt just awful about all that flying but noted that making the same trip by train would have taken twelve hours, an inconveniently long stretch that would have cut into his work and family time [The Guardian, “Greenpeace Losses: Leaked Documents Reveal Extent of Financial Disarray,” June 23, 2014]. Cue the violin!
So the official position of Greenpeace is that flying is destroying the planet, so don’t do it … unless, of course, you do it only because it’s faster and more convenient than taking less-polluting forms of mass transit. Say, isn’t that the exact same reason all the rest of us fly? Yes, but the difference is that when environmentalists do it, they feel just awful about it, which makes them better people than us. In fact, if liberal guilt absorbed CO2, we wouldn’t have to think twice about greenhouse gases.
No wonder they feel so much guilt: A University of Exeter researcher found that people who described themselves as “committed environmentalists” actually flew more than nonenvironmentalists (to be fair, there are a lot of very important environmental conferences held in various resorts all around the world every year). They rationalized it by imagining that the recycling they did at home balanced out all the CO2 generated by their jetting around. If only someone could invent a plane powered by self-delusion!
It’s this type of hypocrisy that inspired law professor and blogmaster Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit to develop his rule for environmental scare stories, one that he has occasion to quote with surprising frequency: “I’ll believe this is a serious problem when the people who claim it’s a serious problem start acting like it’s a serious problem.”
Of course, environmental hypocrisy isn’t confined to Hollywood stars and radical activist groups. It’s also become a potent political issue for those who believe that every problem, including lousy weather, is a justification for ceding more power, freedom, and money to the government.
Like the Internet, environmentalism stretches back a long way, yet many people believe Al Gore invented it. There’s no question that Gore’s slideshow-turned-film documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, gave a huge jumpstart to the global warming … sorry, “climate change” … wait, sorry, “climate disruption” … no, hold on, “climate chaos” movement. (If the science is settled, why do they have to keep changing its name?) I won’t bother recounting all the challenges to Gore’s claims, as many others have already done so; or the widely noted disparities between the Spartan existence Gore prescribes for the rest of humanity and his own opulent, jet-set lifestyle. I’ll just point out what I consider the most damning fact of all: While he was prophesying that global warming would cause a twenty-foot sea-level rise by the year 2100, flooding coastal areas and leaving hundreds of millions homeless (a claim debunked by a University of Montana study), he spent nearly $9 million on an oceanfront mansion in the limousine-liberal enclave of Montecito, California [USA Today, “How Green Is Al Gore’s $9 Million Montecito Oceanfront Villa?” May 18, 2010]. If he truly believed in his own message, wouldn’t it have been wiser to spend $1 million on a mansion in Phoenix, Arizona, and then just wait for it to become oceanfront property?
It’s no surprise that the biggest proponent of expanding government to combat “climate disruption” is also among the biggest emitters of hot gas. On Earth Day 2014, President Obama issued a Presidential Proclamation listing the many dire consequences of climate change and the valiant ways in which he was working “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions around the globe.” He also posted a “green” call-to-arms on the White House blog, declaring, “Our climate is changing, and that change is being driven by human activity. Every year, the United States pumps millions of tons of carbon dioxide pollution and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Earth Day is about taking action.”
And take action he did! To spread his message, Obama embarked on a whirlwind Earth Day promotional tour, flying from D.C. to Washington State to Tokyo to spread the gospel of reducing fossil fuel use and cutting CO2 emissions.
Using numbers from the Department of Energy, the UK newspaper the Daily Mail calculated that Obama’s Excellent Earth Day Adventure burned 35,600 gallons of helicopter and jet fuel, pumping out 375 tons of carbon dioxide “around the globe.” That doesn’t include all the fuel used for his motorcades, security, the cars of the people who turned out to see him, and the entire fleet of planes including at least two C-5 transport planes. That figure is just the carbon footprint for his Marine One copter and his 747 jet, Air Force One. It would take the average resident of the planet Earth 441 years to generate as much CO2 as Obama did just to warn us about CO2 on Earth Day.
By comparison, I also delivered an Earth Day message to millions of people. Granted, it was to point out the tremendous waste and hypocrisy of Obama’s tour, but it did reach millions of people, and it caused far less damage to the environment than Obama did. It aired on my daily syndicated radio show, The Huckabee Report. Here’s how a true conservationist spreads his message.
As usual, I communicated by e-mail with my writing and research staff. When we finished the script, I recorded it using a portable microphone and my trusty MacBook laptop. The recording was e-mailed as an MP3 file to my producer, who inserted the commercial and uploaded it to the Internet. Finally, over five hundred radio stations downloaded it and played it to millions of listeners nationwide. At no point did any of the people involved even have to step outside their homes or offices. The total CO2 generated was probably no more than if I’d switched on one of those corkscrew-shaped, environmentally correct lightbulbs that make people look like they’re in the morgue.
All those savings in CO2 were due to modern technology that eliminated the need to travel to speak to a big gathering (which would also have required travel for the audience), to commute to an office or studio to write and record the show, or to ship it to the stations. And it’s all thanks to the many companies like Apple, Intel, and AT&T that make it possible and affordable. These evil, capitalist, for-profit corporations, with their constant striving for greater efficiency, have eliminated far more pollution and greenhouse gasses than the environmental extremists railing against capitalism could dream of stopping with heavy-handed government edicts. Say, maybe someone should tell the President about capitalism, competition, and technology!
I believe in the old Boy Scout rule. As a Scout, I was taught to leave the campsite in as good or better shape than I found it. It’s my deeply held conviction that the Earth and all its resources don’t belong to me, but to God. He lets me use them, but doesn’t permit me to abuse them. It should be my responsibility to be a good steward, or manager, of the natural resources. I want my children and grandchildren to enjoy them as much as I have.
At this point, I think it would be wise to set the record straight on one of the most unfair canards in the entire environmental movement: the attempt to tar anyone who questions apocalyptic predictions about man-made climate change as a “climate change denier,” a scientific illiterate comparable to a Holocaust denier. This may surprise you, but I don’t believe I’ve ever met a conservative who denies that the Earth’s climate is changing. Most people are well aware that the Earth’s climate is constantly changing. I’ve also met very few conservatives who think that humans have no impact on the environment. But as we like to say down South, the devil is in the details.
Those who question apocalyptic environmental claims have been given plenty of good reasons to be skeptical, including scandals over altered and hidden data and the blatant, thuggish suppression of dissenting scientists. Some environmental activists have openly admitted that they believe their cause to be so important that exaggerating the scary consequences is justified to achieve their desired results. Then there’s the lockstep biased media reporting. Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute noted that a recent UN IPCC report that was widely touted by the media as ironclad proof of cataclysmic, irreversible man-made climate change actually used the terms “uncertain” or “uncertainty” 173 times in its chapter on computer models [AEI.org. “Politics Posing as Science,” December 3, 2007]. So far, those computer models have been about as accurate in their predictions as a drunken stockbroker with a Ouija board.
God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 17