Another Liberal Mugged by Reality

As is the lamestream media’s wont when the news isn’t good for this president, the story was not given much prominence last week when it broke. However, it’s a much bigger deal than they care to admit, and may have longer-lasting ramifications if only people wise up enough to vote Obama out next year.

Obama directed the withdrawal of suddenly "controversial" EPA regulations that, according to the article, would “reduce concentrations of ground-level ozone, smog's main ingredient. The decision rests in part on reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.” In other words, with the August report of no new jobs ringing in his ears, Obama realized he was painting himself into a corner by continuing his kamikaze mission to destroy what’s left of the American free-market economy before the 2012 election. Instead, this decision simply kicks yet another can down the road—this one until 2013, which means that if we’re unfortunate enough to still have Obama around, we haven’t seen the last of these job-killing regulations.

In the morass of ever-tightening environmental regulations the EPA and its minions are trying to impose on us you can find two things: (1) the true extremism that conservatives are constantly and falsely accused of, and (2) the true, crystal clear view of the Left that corporate America is the source of all the evil and woe in this country. Let’s tackle each of these, shall we?

First, all it takes is some common-sense extrapolation, when you do some nominal research on the regulations that are on the horizon, to see their obvious and deleterious effects on the economy, the energy-producing industry in particular. The cost of compliance for already-strapped coal-fired power plants, which produce the lion’s share of electrical power in this country, may range from significant to astronomical. Keep in mind that stringent regulations on coal power are nothing new, and coal-fired plants produce far less harmful gasses now than in the past. Therefore there is a real question as to how much value the burden of compliance with ever-tighter regulations will produce. In any event, the people that will be hurt the most—middle and lower-middle class homeowners and renters—are the ones for which the liberals claim to have such compassion. Somehow, I don’t think these folks will feel much compassion when they see their utility bills skyrocket to totally unaffordable amounts. This is true extremism that Republican candidates at all levels should note at every opportunity next year.

Second, it’s easy to see in Obama’s nauseatingly predictable rhetoric about “millionaires and billionaires not doing their share” the class warfare card that the Don Quixotes of the left continue to play against what they see as the greedy, evil capitalists of corporate America. Never mind that many of these “evil” folks are big campaign contributors to Obama and his friends in Congress and have pandered big-time to the environmental lobby. As Shelby Steele brilliantly noted in a column last week about Obama’s failed presidency, the president and many of those who support him “came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him (and them) to be an adversary of American exceptionalism.” And economic freedom (i.e., capitalism) has been the main driver of that exceptionalism. In other words, liberals hate the very thing that has made this country great—all of its flaws notwithstanding.

By calling the temporarily struck-down EPA regulations on ozone ground-level concentrations “controversial,” the liberal media are providing Obama some cover for the criticism he’s receiving from his uber-liberal base. However, regulations like this one have been controversial all along—because they truly are job-killers, middle-class killers, and economy killers. All the while, their supporters claim the regulations are killing what in fact is a largely false bogeyman. That’s what makes them the true extremists, and why their extremist views truly threaten our way of life.