Administration's Emanuel "Never let a good crisis go to waste."/Freedomain.com.pa

EDITOR’S CHOICE:  Crisis Creation. If the mantra of this administration is to “never let a good crisis go to waste,” it is the most frugal one in history, never allowing the crisis an hour it creates not lead to yet another disastrous polity decision. And the President is really challenging his countrymen: “saying if the best medical system in the world is getting more expensive we can afford to destroy it; if the Gulf is leaking oil lets raise our energy prices and move all the manufacturing jobs to India. If we can defeat Saddam Hussein lets invite Iran to dump garbage on our heads. The real mantra should be never let an empty head or a dumb idea go to waste.

EXAMPLE: Obama is trying to use the Gulf spill as an example of the need for More Government, More Regulation, More Taxes and More Control Over Energy Policy. Sen. Joe Lieberman (In-Conn.) and others say all Americans are willing to pay a dollar a day to address global warming, Obama said during the campaign that his carbon tax would ‘necessarily raise utility rates’ by huge amounts.

But Gallup reports this week that 70 percent of voters cite higher taxes as the issue that most angers them the most. Virtually the entire Tea Party movement is based on spending and taxes and has almost no social component. Gallup also reports that the anger over Obama’s handling the spill, which is way worse than Bush /Katrina and growing by the day, indicates people are LESS NOT MORE inclined to accept a larger government role. Washington has absolutely no idea who it governs.

Following the President’s speech last week, Jonah Goldberg of the New York Post summed up the address as well as anyone: In a peculiar instance of synchronicity, President Obama's Oval Office speech to the nation last month resembled the very calamity it was intended to address: Like the oil spewing into the Gulf, it began as a focused and narrow stream of words -- and quickly spread out into an amorphous cloud of goo.

BROMIDES: What started as a just-the-facts-ma'am explanation quickly got caught up in political currents -- by the end we were treated to bromides about the Greatest Generation and putting a man on the moon and preposterous insinuations that the Red Chinese will turn Green before us. (China, mind you, is the country where the rivers burn, the air is crunchy and the government is building a new, filthy, coal-fired power plant every 10 days for the next decade).

Last night we saw just the latest installment of "Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste," written by Rahm Emanuel and performed by The One. The immediate goal: to create the political climate where BP will bend over and say "thank you sir, may I have another" in perpetuity. Beyond that, to browbeat the public and Congress into accepting some version of cap-and-trade legislation that will export jobs and raise energy prices in the middle of a recession.

POLITICAL MESS: If we could defeat Hitler, we can hike your utility bills! If we could put a man on the moon, we can put an American manufacturing job in India! Yes, we can! This points to the intractability of the political mess Obama is in. The White House desperately wants to focus on job creation and fiscal responsibility, or at least appear that way. But Obama's agenda incontinently blows in the opposite direction and every other direction as well.

The president spoke movingly about the lost livelihoods of fishermen in the Gulf. "You know, for generations, men and women who call this region home have made their living from the water. That living is now in jeopardy. I've talked to shrimpers and fishermen who don't know how they're going to support their families this year. I've seen empty docks and restaurants with fewer customers . . ."

All too true. But what about the tens of thousands more Gulf residents who will see their jobs and customers vanish thanks to Obama's drilling moratorium, which may send offshore rigs to Africa for years to come? People have been working in those fields for generations, too.

INCESTUOUS: Obama, in a now tiredly familiar attempt to blame the government's failures on the Bush administration, insisted that the government won't see oil companies as a "partner" anymore. I'm all for breaking the clinch between big government and big business -- but is Barack Obama, the de facto CEO of two car companies and an insurance firm, really the one to be tut-tutting such incestuousness?

Never mind the irony that BP was one of the original boosters of cap-and-trade, what to make of his rousing defense of the energy legislation passed by the House? Huzzah, quoth Obama, it "makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America's businesses."

Translation: Government will subsidize the likes of GE and Archer Daniels Midland to produce energy in ways that aren't profitable in the market. The "profits" will all come from the taxpayer.

CALAMITY: Every calamity, according to the president, proves that his prepackaged campaign agenda is exactly what America needs to fix things. He somehow managed to convince a lot of people that we needed to overhaul health care in order to deal with the financial crisis. Now he wants us to believe that switching to a "green economy" will somehow ensure that we won't have environmental disasters like this anymore.

This is, quite simply, absurd. And it's also sad. The Obama presidency itself is becoming diffuse and amorphous -- because it is becoming clear the president is in over his head.

He admitted that he has no clue how we'll switch from fossil fuels to the new clean-energy nirvana. He conceded we don't "know what that looks like" and we don't "know how to get there."

All he knows how to do is to keep talking.