Curmudgeon's Corner

Change We Can Believe In?

Posted by Al Campbell on April 1, 2010

Economy, Political, Quality of Life, Taxes, U.S., Wisconsin

I’ll trade you one ‘drilling’ for one ‘cap and trade’.

President Obama made a startling reversal when he said that the right decision was to drill for oil off the coast of Virginia.  Startling in a couple of ways:  it flies in the face of what he has stood for since he emerged on the national scene; and, it is what the Republicans have wanted for a long time.

Why would he do this?  Because he is a politician and that is what politicians do.

He is, I suspect, aware that he can pull the ‘compromisers’ amongst the middle of the road Republicans out from under their hidey places and get his cap and trade bill efforts on track again.

I’ll believe this is something more than a political gambit when I see a hole poked in the ground and when I see new refineries sprouting so we can finally rely upon ourselves for our energy needs.

It is difficult to believe our president is not simply playing the opposition trying to peel away the votes he needs to get his bill moving again.  He knows that there is this latent need on the part of some Republicans to try to ‘reach across the aisle’ and prove they can ‘govern’.

This isn’t to say that Democrats are the ones that always play hardball; that isn’t true.  Republicans have their share of such ‘skeletons’ in the closet.

It is a continued perversion of politics by both parties to the detriment of the people.

Carbon control legislation has failed in Europe and it will not fare any better here.  The basis for thinking that humans are responsible for ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’ as it has morphed, is in serious doubt given the revelations recently surfaced about the validity of the data.

Zebras don’t change their stripes, and neither do politicians much as they try to convince us otherwise.  There is a high level of angst amongst the voters in our state and in our country.  These ploys do nothing but exacerbate those feelings of angst.  “We spoke and no one is listening to us” is the common plaint.

This is, unfortunately, politics as usual.  Nothing more and nothing less.