Mid-term blues.

Posted by Pointman on November 13, 2014 · 27 Comments 

The mid-term elections in America are over and the big winner is the Republican party who’ve taken control of both houses of congress. There are a number of conclusions to be drawn from the results.

The big one is that once you get past the media’s continuing love affair with the concept of a Barack Obama, the majority of Americans are deeply disillusioned with him. The perception and the reality is that he and his administration don’t actually do anything. They’re like rabbits paralysed in the headlights of whatever crisis is currently bearing down on them.

In the absence of any type of New Deal policy to get people back to work, the economy is still scraping along not far above the bottom and places like Detroit, which used to be the pounding heart of manufacturing America, are imploding down to fractions of their former populations. If you’re a working man and just can’t find work, you have to move elsewhere. What jobs being created are “Mac” jobs; part-time, poorly paid and if you’re providing for a family, just not enough to get everyone by unless you’ve got a second job or are prepared to do the food stamps route.

There’s an ineffectual buffoon in charge of a foreign policy which veers from one course to another driven by nothing more than an aversion to making unpopular decisions. Putin pulls a Sudetenland on the Ukraine and Kerry’s response is to lecture African leaders on how vital it is to stop their people from farming. The war in Iraq, which was won, has been thrown away along with the lives used to win it. Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are all heading towards being chaotic failed states, in all likelihood to be run by the thugs of ISIS and even the limited air war against that is so micro-controlled by the White House that targets of opportunity are usually long gone before the provisional okay to strike comes through.

In the meantime, Obama has reportedly played more games of golf in the last year than Tiger Woods. It didn’t help that after issuing a suitably solemn condemnation of ISIS hacking the head off an American hostage, he was to be seen five minutes later in background shot laughing and joking with his golfing pals as they teed off. He’s in the Oval Office, feet up on the desk mode and just riding out the last two years of his second term. Let’s just pray to god nothing shaped like a Cuban missile crisis appears in that time.

Having failed on both the domestic and foreign fronts, he’s concentrated on doing the legacy thing, which actually involves sneaking in by the back door the sort of decarbonisation policies which he couldn’t push through congress. I’m pretty sure the governors of the effected states will jam up the EPA directives in the courts for the required two years. It’ll be yet another one of his failed policies.

The bigger takeaway from it all is that throwing a lot of money at an unpopular idea won’t make it any the more palatable to a disinterested electorate. A multi-millionaire threw the best part of a hundred million Yankee dollars to get his pet congressmen elected in order to carry the global warming flag forward and the voters simply said no. As my mother used to say, a fool and their money are soon parted, but he’d lots of company. The green blob collective emptied their coffers for laughably dismal results.

At points the whole thing devolved down into a farce where the Democratic party hopefuls, whose leader is fixated about saving the planet, didn’t want to talk about it, most especially in mining states like Kentucky. On the other hand, the Republicans kept raising the issue to hold a flame thrower to the ass of their opposition to keep them on the back foot for most of the campaign. As tactics go, it was a winner and you’ll see it again in 2016.

In the meantime and with a great fanfare, Obama has announced a breakthrough understanding with China about their carbon emissions. It’s of course non-binding, the limits as such don’t exist and there’s absolutely no downside if any such vague limits don’t happen to be met. In point of fact, China can just let rip on the emissions front to 2030 which is when they judge they’ll have emitted their utmost, so could perhaps maybe might sorta consider going backwards on the old industrialisation Foxtrot. You can just imagine them in sixteen years time chomping on the bit to please Obama. Yeah, well, a squadron of pigs just flew over the Bar & Grill.

You didn’t have to be some slick political pollster to know the way the mid-terms were going to turn out. Every man and his dawg had a pretty shrewd idea of the outcome for a lot more reasons than climate fixation, and yet the climate fanatics threw the kitchen sink at it. Break open all the piggy banks, get the troops out, maximum effort. It was a battle on the wrong ground at the wrong time and with the wrong champion leading the charge for them.

I’ve often said the reason they’ve never managed to suppress the climate skeptics is because they have a stereotype of us which bears no relation to the reality. They fight an imagined chimera which ticks all their bigoted boxes. In a very similar sense, that same blind spot, that same fanatical drive ignores the reality of a changed political landscape.

A cynical truism of politics is that when a political star is fading, it’s time to find someone else in the ascendant rather than hitching your wagon to them as they plunge. They’re going down and taking whatever your message was with them. That’s the double whammy of being stoopid.

At this stage in the game, there are times when being a skeptic is a pure spectator sport. Do nothing, they’re up there on that ledge thirty storeys high over West 52nd and can’t be talked back in through the window.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with China, Fanatics, Obama, Politics