Obama Stealth Socialism And The EPA

As a nation breathlessly awaits Mr. Obama's upcoming homily on his certain economic salvation of the nation, it might be good to recall that President Obama recently directed the EPA to put on hold proposed regulations that would have substantially ramped up smog control controls relating to ozone. The regulations, if imposed, would have hit American businesses with as much as $90 billion dollars a year in compliance costs.

This move has been met with praise from some quarters. Even Conservatives, who tend to want to respect their leaders and who tend to want to seek the good in them, even to the extent of giving due credit to political enemies who have sworn ever-lasting enmity against them, have also given cautious praise to the President. Perhaps a few are wondering if, at long last, Mr. Obama might be seeing the light—compact fluorescent light, not incandescent light, of course.

However, many Progressives, including virtually all environmentalists, are wailing, gnashing their teeth and rending their garments in expressing their disappointment, even outrage at Mr. Obama's enviro-apostasy.

All are wrong.

Barack Obama remains what he always has been: A Marxist-indoctrinated stealth Socialist. However, extraordinary circumstances of Mr. Obama's own making have forced him to temporarily bow to reality, not for the sake of reality, but for a far more important consideration: the sake of his own reelection.

To better understand what is happening, it may be useful to consider three discrete time frames: the upcoming presidential campaign (for Mr. Obama, the campaign is eternal), the lame duck post election day period from early November until the inauguration in early January of 2013, and the next presidential term.

On September 2, Friday, the traditional Washington bad news dumping day, the Labor Department admitted that in August, not a single new job was created (or presumably, saved) for the first time since 1945, and that official unemployment remained at 9.1%. Adding to the economic bad news, the Obama Administration also admitted that unemployment would almost certainly remain at 9+% throughout 2012. Historically, no president has won reelection with unemployment at such an elevated level. In fact, Democrats ruthlessly excoriated President George W. Bush for unemployment in the 5% range, which videos will make for amusing viewing during the coming campaign.

No doubt Mr. Obama, at the behest of his more occasionally rational advisors, has realized that unless he creates at least the appearance of moderating his reflexively anti-American, anti-business, rabidly pro-labor union and environmentalist core beliefs, his electoral prospects are grim at best. So why not announce a roll back (which can be reinstated when the heat is off) of a juicy, politically charged regulation about to be imposed by a much-reviled agency? It's a perfect, and perfectly predictable, stealth Socialist ploy.

Mr. Obama's base will be allowed, even encouraged, to complain while giving independents the illusion that he has suddenly discovered rational policy. Even some conservatives might be tempted to partake of the Kool Aid for they, trusting souls (suckers!), seek the good in others and hope for their repentance and redemption. Simultaneously, the more rabid environmentalists are unleashed to express vitriolic disgust. All the while, however, the wiser of the Socialist base know that Mr. Obama is winking at them and that they can't lose.

If Mr. Obama wins a second term, even if Republicans control both houses of Congress, America will see a blizzard of executive orders and bureaucrat-imposed regulations that will take a generation to undo, if such undoing is even possible. If he loses, America will experience a two-month blizzard of executive orders, regulations and pardons that will make Bill Clinton's pardons of Puerto Rican terrorists and of Marc Rich seem paragons of wisdom and rectitude in the administration of justice by comparison. In both cases, Progressives know that many such mandates, once established, will never be fully overturned. Despite their hatred for Ronald Reagan, Progressives ironically give him credit through their actions for his aphorism that the closest thing to eternal life we will ever see on Earth is a government program.

Regardless of the outcome of the election, Mr. Obama's actions are merely a cynical continuation of his standard operating procedure: If it can't be obtained legislatively, accomplish it by means of executive order or bureaucracy. Like a bargain basement children's party magician, with his left hand he misdirects, rolling back or temporarily delaying a handful of ruinous regulations and mandates, while with his right he imposes thousands of new, far more destructive regulations.

More than 4200 new regulations enacted since his election have been put into effect or will soon be imposed. Unless it is fully repealed, the more than 100 new federal bureaucracies conjured by ObamaCare will add thousands of additional regulations even more expensive, economy-destroying and enervating than those already imposed or planned, for the full impact of ObamaCare is not in those regulations written in the thousands of pages of the law, for in those which will be created by unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats. Mr. Obama will surely do nothing to ward off this perfect storm of rule making and imposition by the Socialist administrative state he has worked so hard to create. This is Mr. Obama's only true accomplishment, and it is to America's detriment.

It is Socialist orthodoxy, not rational thought or concern for America that drives Mr. Obama. It forces him to continue to double down on obviously failed policies rational men would have long ago abandoned, for the Socialist truly believes only two things: Socialism cannot possibly be wrong, and Mr. Obama and his cadre of self-imagined elite Socialists will succeed where all Socialists before them have failed. This may seem self contradictory, but that's certainly not Socialist thinking.

Rational people behold the abject failure and obscene waste of the Stimulus and vow never to repeat such an idiotic mistake. Socialists believe it failed only temporarily and only because it was too small. They demand more and even bigger and more wasteful Stimuli; they want to do more and spend more. Rational people behold Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and realize that they will soon bankrupt the nation. They want to take affirmative steps to retain necessary social protections for the deserving while preventing disaster. Socialists ignore the washed out bridge over the looming fiscal abyss and pass, against the wishes of the American people, ObamaCare, an entitlement which will, by itself, bankrupt the nation, even cynically stealing a half trillion dollars from its lesser brethren to prop it up.

If a Socialistic program is floundering, this can only be because insufficient socialism has been applied. If more is applied but still avails nothing, this can only be because conservatives are allowed to exist to oppose it or because the program has not had sufficient time to work its transformative miracles. Socialism is always and in all ways unfalsifiable; it cannot fail; it cannot be wrong.

Has Mr. Obama truly seen the CFL light? Ask Texas. If a January 1 EPA rule regulating cross-state air pollution goes into effect, Texas—and a great many other states—will have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade their coal-fired power plants. This despite the fact that even the EPA admits that Texas really doesn't contribute to the problem and has its own, stringent, pollution control laws. Mr. Obama, during the campaign, promised to essentially destroy the American coal industry and threatened to bankrupt coal-fired power producers.

The effects of such a regulation in Texas alone would be catastrophic. Texas, like most states, cannot do without a single megawatt of power. Any degradation in power production capacity would result in periodic blackouts in times of greatest demand, particularly during the summers, resulting in multiple deaths of the poor and infirm. Those of greater means will almost certainly install fossil-fueled generators, which will contribute to rather than reduce pollution, but Socialism cannot be wrong. Texas was never going to vote for Mr. Obama anyway, so why should he care?

Before the election, Mr. Obama earned the coveted title of the most leftist Senator in America, more left even than the sole self-identified Socialist. That title is surely richly deserved, unlike the Nobel Prize he won for being Barack Obama. Like all magicians, Mr. Obama deals only in illusion.