Post-American Presidency
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Lieberman’s conclusion was ominous: “Overall, Waxman-Markey reduces gross domestic product by an average of $393 billion annually between 2012 and 2035, and cumulatively by $9.4 trillion. In other words, the nation will be $9.4 trillion poorer with Waxman-Markey than without it.”8
In fact, the burden that Waxman-Markey would place on American individuals and businesses would be so crushing that the bill was a hard sell even among the Leftists and moderate Democrats. The Wall Street Journal observed in June 2009 that “despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman’s many payoffs to members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership’s solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.”9
That sleight of hand worked on House Democrats. It won’t work, however, to stave off economic disaster for the American people. Republican critics were scathing. Said Karl Rove: “Cap-and-trade would not achieve its goals—and it would put America on a ruinous course.… Putting a tax on carbon means that every American who flips a light switch, turns a car key, or buys anything made or shipped in this country will pay more.”10
Rove also observed that cap and trade “would require a larger, more intrusive government bureaucracy, regulating vast swatches of our economy and diminishing innovation, flexibility, and enterprise.”
That sounded like just the thing that would warm the heart of the socialist post-American president. “Businesses,” Rove continued, “would reduce their cap-and-trade costs by moving jobs to countries without a tax on carbon or a cap on greenhouse emissions.”11 So more businesses would move out of the United States, to the benefit of overseas competitors.
Once again, it sounded like something right up the alley of the internationalist ideologue Obama.
Obama’s most determined, formidable, patriotic, and populist critic, Sarah Palin, was as unimpressed as Rove. “I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan,” she wrote in July 2009, “and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.… The president’s cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.”
Palin pointed out that the framers of the bill seemed to realize that it would result in Americans losing their jobs, making it all the more bitterly ironic that Obama was actually calling this a jobs bill: “Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.”12 Commented Chris Tucker of the Institute for Energy Research: “Can you name another jobs-creation bill that was so concerned about its potential impact that it preemptively included a benefits program for the millions of workers it expected to displace?”13
Palin asked a question that Obama the internationalist might have been reluctant to answer (and not surprisingly, he ignored it): “We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama’s plan will result in the latter.”14
An Exxon Mobil executive with three decades of experience attended a presentation on the bill given by Richard Igercich, a refinery manager for Chalmette Refining, L.L.C., a joint venture of Exxon Mobil PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company; Dan Borne, president of the Gulf South Chemical Plants Association; and an Exxon Mobil political analyst. The executive emerged from this presentation with the conviction that “the Bill is a very complex one and offers devastating results to you, me, our generations to come and every business in America.”
The executive said that the bill would deprive ordinary Americans of gasoline, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and heating oil, and dramatically increase the costs of electricity, coal, and natural gas. He said that this was part and parcel of Obama’s plan: to wean America off crude oil petroleum products simply by making them too expensive for Americans to afford. “The bill in its present form,” he said, “targets Oil Refineries and Chemical Plants as the most dangerous contributors to Global Warming,” while there are “no scientific facts to support that accusation.”15
It was all political.
OBAMA’S ENABLING ACT?
One ominous detail in the cap-and-trade bill was that it gave the president emergency powers to act to stop global warming. The bill lays out a series of conditions that would be considered to constitute such an emergency—most notably, if global greenhouse gas levels rise above 450 parts per million. But it is a very real possibility that greenhouse gas levels could rise above 450 parts per million as early as 2010.
If they do, the president must “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions” to lower emissions levels. “The bill’s language,” according to investigative journalist David Freddoso, “places an unusually broad mandate upon the president to act in the event of this ‘emergency’ situation.” He explains that “declaration of this ‘climate emergency’ could result in federal agencies denying all discretionary permits for carbon-emitting industries.”16
The president, in short, could destroy whole American industries that refused to tow his political and environmental line. And with broad and vaguely defined “emergency powers,” he could destroy the American system of checks and balances, and the restraints on executive authority that have always been the hallmark of the American Republic.
With his taste for socialism and authoritarianism, however, Barack Obama never much cared much for those restraints. And so constitutional rule was imperiled as never before in American history—and all for what turned out to be a completely fabricated crisis.
THE GLOBAL WARMING COVER-UP: “A MIRACLE HAS HAPPENED”
Fresh on the heels of Lord Christopher Monckton’s declaration about Obama’s plans to sign away American sovereignty for global warming came a blockbuster exposé that blew the lid off the climate-change hoax.
Obama had been poised to sign away American sovereignty for that hoax.
Suspicions had been mounting throughout the first year of Obama’s presidency about the supposedly assured results that purported to establish global warming as fact. In July 2009 Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union, expressed the growing skepticism of many when he wrote in The American Spectator that “the science behind global warming is now collapsing. The most reliable satellite weather data shows that global atmospheric temperatures have declined over the last 11 years, with the trend downward accelerating. Even global warming advocates are now conceding that this trend may continue for decades.”17
But real cracks in the edifice didn’t start appearing until several months later. It all started with four words that shook the world. “A miracle has happened,” a writer cryptically posted to Climate Audit, a Web site devoted to showing that climate-change science was junk science.
The cryptic writer followed those four words with a link to another site, Real Climate. There, on the morning of November 17, 2009, was a veritable treasure trove for scientists and citizens who had long been skeptical about mankind’s role in global warming.
The computers of the Hadley Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, England, were hacked, whereupon over a thousand e-mails and over four thousand extraordinarily revealing documents were made public, showing how global warming advocates plotted to deceive the public about the holes in the theory. The miracle had indeed happened: it was revealed not only that “global warming” was a hoax, but that its foremost advocates knew it was a hoax, and strategized on how to keep that information from the American people.
According to Dr. Tim Ball, an environmental consultant and
former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, the Hadley Unit controlled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports and prepared the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). These reports were the linchpin of the efforts to convince the public that rapid action had to be taken by governments to reverse the effects of man-made global warming.18
The scientists who prepared these reports were lying, and they knew they were lying. In one of the e-mails Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) and—up to this point—one of the most respected global warming advocates internationally, casually tells his colleagues how he manipulated data to hide evidence that average temperatures are actually decreasing, not increasing: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Another scientist admits that the data don’t fit the theory for which Obama was ready to subject America to international authorities: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
The scientists discussed at length how to close their fellow scientists who were skeptical about global warming out of the climate-change debate, and ultimately discredit them completely: “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature’. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.… What do others think?”19
Ball concludes: “Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU [Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia], the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.”20
Even The New York Times, while remaining smug about the total victory of global warming advocates, revealed that it was shaken: “The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.” Yet it quoted one climatologist whose assessment was a bit more honest: “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”21
The corrupt, activist media worked hard to bury this explosive story. Environmental reporter Andrew Revkin explained primly in The New York Times why the Paper of Record was not printing the e-mails: “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”22
“Acquired illegally”? “Statements that were never intended for the public eye”? Funny how that never seemed to bother them when they published The Pentagon Papers.
Yet despite the “mushroom cloud” hanging over what had been the assured proof of man-made global warming, Obama headed to Europe at the end of November to accept his Nobel Peace Prize and make what he promised would be a major address on global warming. Many of us have exposed the hoax of climate change as revealed by legitimate, responsible scientists for years, but still Obama and the socialist elites were determined to rob us blind and torment us with legislation and regulation on what they continued to call “the greatest threat facing humanity.”
As Obama headed to Copenhagen, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed the leaked e-mails and the fraud they revealed: “I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of this”—that is, anthropogenic global warming.23 “There is nothing in the hacked e-mails that undermines the science upon which this decision is based,” Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson gamely asserted.24 Global warming czar Carol Browner likewise clung doggedly to her tattered faith: “There has been for a very long time a very small group of people who continue to say this isn’t a real problem, that we don’t need to do anything. On the other hand, we have 2,500 of the world’s foremost scientists who are in absolute agreement that this is a real problem and that we need to do something and we need to do something as soon as possible. What am I going to do, side with the couple of naysayers out there, or the 2,500 scientists? I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists. I mean, these people have been studying this issue for a very, very long time, and agree that the problem is real.”25
That they might have come to such an agreement based on fraudulent data didn’t seem to trouble her.
The irony was thick. When Barack Obama appointed his science czar, John P. Holdren, he declared that “promoting science isn’t just about providing resources.” Rather, “it’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient.”26
Except, apparently, when the inconvenient truths involved the fraud of global warming. In that event, it was no longer important to listen to “our scientists” at all, or to read their embarrassing e-mails.
Sarah Palin urged Obama to reconsider and boycott the Copenhagen conference, and skewered his hypocrisy: “Policy should be based on sound science, not snake oil.… Policy decisions require real science and real solutions, not junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a ‘sin’ against the planet. In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to ‘restore science to its rightful place.’ Boycotting Copenhagen while this scandal is thoroughly investigated would send a strong message that the United States government will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices. Saying no to Copenhagen and cap and tax are first steps in ‘restoring science to its rightful place.’”27
Palin kept up the pressure, writing a week later in The Washington Post that “what Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats’ cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs—particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.”28
But Barack Hussein Obama paid no heed. And so, with the prospect of international climate controls looming, American sovereignty was once again threatened.
EPILOGUE
WHAT LOVERS OF FREEDOM MUST DO
When the history of the Obama administration is written, one of its most heinous crimes will be its deliberate policy of destroying American superiority.
We are living at a time of so many firsts, it is difficult to get one’s arms and one’s mind around it. As I said at the beginning of this book, America is being tested in a way she has never been tested before—and you won’t like what comes after America.
In the first year of the post-American presidency, both Iran and North Korea were emboldened to press forward with their nuclear-weapons programs. At the end of December 2009, Gao Shangtao, a professor of international relations at Beijing’s China Foreign Affairs University, was blunt: “The world is worse off than a year ago.” Iran and North Korea “will not give up.”
Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies said flatly about Iran and North Korea: “Nothing seems to have worked.” UN sanctions proved powerless even to slow them down. Obama’s repeated calls for negotiations came to nothing. Nations that have depended upon the United States to aid in their defense—notably Israel and the Asian states surrounding North Korea—are
quietly exploring other options in the new, post-American world.1
And that’s after a year of Obama. Imagine what the world will be like after four years of the post-American presidency.
Obama has moved against free speech and free media, raised taxes, and moved to nationalize the health-care system. In what arena has he ever endorsed independence of thought, action, or property?
America is not dead. But it is time to stand up.
Fight! Defiance is our answer. This is the quintessentially American answer to overwhelming government authority.
For the first time in modern history, during the first months of the Obama administration millions of Americans took to the streets to protest big government. The protesters came in all races, creeds, colors, and ages. This was not a movement limited to one demographic group; it was a distinctly American movement. And while the media tried to pigeonhole it with limiting labels like tea parties, town hall meetings, or 912ers, in reality it was a singular expression of outrage that heralded the beginning of a new American revolution. It was an ordinarily docile population motivated to take to the streets of their towns and cities or jump into the car and head to D.C. to try to stop Obama and the Democrats from plunging the freest nation on earth down the road to serfdom.2
These protests were a great American moment. And they were ignored in official Washington. The will of the people was dismissed the way an autocratic ruler would turn away supplicants with haughty indifference. It spoke volumes as to what we were dealing with in the White House, the Senate, and the House.
America is under siege. The people are peacefully rebelling and are being summarily ignored. So what is to be done?