t’s one thing to stick to your goals in the face of adversity. That reflects strong character. It’s another thing to be tone deaf and arrogant.
A number of issues starkly demonstrate that the Obama Administration and its congressional allies seem to be clearly in the latter camp.
The nation has demonstrated massive resistance to ObamaCare, including three straight elections in which voters rejected liberals in Virginia, New Jersey and even Massachusetts. Opposition to government health care has also fueled the meteoric rise of the Tea parties. Recall efforts are already underway in New Jersey and Louisiana against U.S. senators who voted for it. But Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are still at it.
They want a Republican fig leaf of “bipartisanship.” So they are staging a half day, televised conference on Feb. 25 on a “new” health scheme based on the previous 2,000-page bills. When the Republicans gag on this recycled bowl of swill, the Dems will accuse them of not being bipartisan, and then try to jam a bill through the Senate with a reconciliation process that gets around a promised GOP filibuster.
It’s no wonder that Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have plunged about 20 points since he took over in January 2009, with 42 percent saying they “strongly disapprove,” while only 23 percent “strongly approve.” And Congress is not exactly loved right now. A February 2010 Gallup poll shows 78 percent of the public disapproves of the way Congress is operating, an all-time low. Only 18 percent approve. Keep in mind that Congress has been working feverishly from the Obama playbook, pushing the stimulus package, the government health care takeover, expanding the federal payroll, empowering unions, and rubber stamping his many radical appointees. Their bizarre behavior has spooked employers, who are delaying hiring, thus keeping the unemployment rate above 10 percent.
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Last year, the House passed the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade (Tax) bill that would impose more than $200 billion in new energy taxes, create a massive carbon credit bureaucracy, and fashion the skids to send the United States downhill into the arms of the power-mad global warming enthusiasts. The only reason the Senate did not follow suit was that the health care train wreck blocked the tracks.
It doesn’t seem to matter that the climate change data have exploded in their faces like an overheated bottle of Coke. The phony “facts” on temperatures, glaciers, ice shelves, sea levels and even polar bear populations are falling apart. Does it matter that head researcher Phil Jones at Great Britain’s University of East Anglia, the nerve center of the scam, resigned? Jones finally admitted that there is no evidence for global warming in the last 15 years, and that the warming period during the Middle Ages might have been hotter than today, despite no appreciable carbon emissions. Does it matter that Yvo de Boer, the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which works alongside the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the driving force behind Al Gore’s ambitions for global government, has also resigned after presiding over the Copenhagen conference fiasco?
No matter. They’re not listening in Washington. So Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is riding to the rescue. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson wrote to Congress on Feb. 22 warning that the EPA will begin targeting power plants in 2011, and get around to harassing other emitters, such as dry cleaners and hospitals, by 2016. Jackson says the EPA has to continue the charade (not her words) because of the 2007 decision by the eminent scientists on the Supreme Court (not her words) who ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases from vehicles are a regulated pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That includes CO2, which we all exhale, so heavy snorers had better hide under their pillows.
How about the renewed drive to shove homosexuality down the throats of the nation’s armed forces? Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen cannot argue that this would enhance the military, just that they would try to “minimize disruption and polarization.” They’re not listening to surveys showing a majority of men and women in the services opposed, nor to the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, with a combined four million members. Nor do the views of more than 1,150 retired admirals and generals who don’t have to salute Obama carry much weight. Or that we are in the middle of wars against Islamic fascism – not that it would ever make sense to turn a vice into a virtue.
Speaking of the homosexual agenda, the Obama White House is still tone deaf when it comes to the scandalous appointment of homosexual activist Kevin Jennings as the nation’s “safe schools” czar at the Department of Education. The founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Jennings has been asked to resign his “czar” post by more than 50 congressmen. The legislators don’t think much of the sexually explicit scenarios in GLSEN’s recommended books for children, nor GLSEN’s staging events at which obscene sex pamphlets were available to teens. There’s more, but this should be enough.
Washington’s ears also seem closed to public resistance to the plan to close Guantanamo Bay and have terrorist trials in civilian courts. Although Attorney General Eric Holder has backed off his pledge to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City, he reiterated on Feb. 22 that the civilian court system is fine for trying “thugs.” We’re not talking about the Jets and the Sharks here, but state-supported terrorists who specialize in mass murder. Holder acknowledged recently that his Justice Department has at least nine attorneys who have either represented terror suspects or worked for firms that did. He finally responded to a three-month-old request about this from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), but provided little information not already known. The letter, according to Washington Examiner reporter Byron York, contained this tidbit:
“Holder also assured Grassley that ‘all department appointees understand that their client is the United States.’” Now what would give Justice Department officials the idea that they work for someone else?
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