Obama Promises More Gore

In another reason to vote for John McCain, Barack Obama wants to hire Al Gore to work for his administration, should he win.

At a town-hall meeting, Obama was asked if he would tap the former vice president for his Cabinet to handle global warming.

"I would," Obama said. "Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He's somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues, but climate change is real. It is something we have to deal with now, not 10 years from now, not 20 years from now."

Earlier, Rich pointed out Ted Turner's rather more gory outlook. So apparently, our choices are Gore or gore. Or McCain, who we at least stand some chance of getting to exercise some restraint.  

Ted Turner: A New Dim-Witted Malthus

Consider this another example, one in a long and depressing string of examples, that our educational system has been in the crapper for some time:  Global Warming Will Cause Mass Cannibalism

TED TURNER: Not doing it [ed. "it" being something drastic about Anthropogenic Global Warming (tm)] will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there'll be no more corn grown. Not doing it is suicide. Just like dropping bombs on each other, nuclear weapons is suicide. We've got to stop doing the suicidal two things, which are hanging on to our nuclear weapons and after that we've got to stabilize the population. When I was born-

CHARLIE ROSE: So what's wrong with the population?

TURNER: We're too many people. That's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people, they'd be using less stuff.

This is so stupid it hurts.  But it does underscore how much of the AGW crowd's appeal is built upon a grade school level morality tale.  "See the bad people!  See how greedy the bad people are??!  Watch how their greed bites them in the butt!" 

Of course, the Malthusian implications in Ted Turner's vision are a little more sinister:

"See all the multitude of poor people who want to be rich people?  How greedy of them!  We can't have them succeed at that, now can we?  It's better if they didn't exist.  How can we get them to stop breathing??  Hmmm…"

It's amazing that so many supposedly secular people want so desperately to be living in "end times."

Good Thing She Didn’t Ask For A Raise

QandO and Powerline both point to this: Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior It makes for some fascinating reading:

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

 The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

 Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

 Why?

 “Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

It seems in the zeal to not only remove Richard Nixon, but also to keep a lid on any politically damaging information about Democrats that might have surfaced in a general airing of dirty laundry, Clinton was part of a cabal seeking to deny President Nixon the right to counsel during any impeachment proceedings.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

 The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.

 “As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.

 The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do? “Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.

 The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.

Unreal. I'm sure there is some sort of possible spin to this, that Clinton was only doing her work under the direction of a more senior person, but there seems to be a, shall we call it, "initiative" taken that is unseemly at best. All of it begs the question: I wonder when the repercussions from Watergate will come to an end?

Today’s Historical Note

On this day in 1513, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida. This is the first recorded instance of what has come to be called "Spring Break" or "The Fountain of Youths."

That “L” Word

Peter Wehner pens an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that calls for John McCain to highlight Barack Obama's 'liberalness'. Wehner says the convenient political shorthand speaks volumes to people – and volumes about the person so labeled. 

National Journal rated him as the most liberal person in the Senate in 2007, and for good reason. On economic policy, Mr. Obama favors higher income, Social Security and corporate taxes. He supports massive increases in domestic spending and greater government regulation of the economy. He favors a significantly larger role for the federal government in health care. He opposes the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mr. Obama has criticized the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a partial birth abortion ban, and he wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. He voted against John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. In Illinois, Mr. Obama supported banning the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns. And he supports granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

On national security matters, Mr. Obama voted to deny legal immunity to telecom companies that have cooperated with the government in warrantless wiretapping of suspected terrorists. He wants to grant habeas corpus rights to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. He supports a full-scale withdrawal from Iraq. And he says, in his first year in office, he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea without preconditions.

It's no wonder that Mr. Obama has been endorsed by Moveon.org – one of the most radical groups within the liberal universe.

Of course, that political shorthand that has been so successful in the past is fairly well outdated these days. Leftist is more accurately descriptive than liberal. There is actually very little in Obama's stances – few though they are – that reflect liberal views, in the classical sense. Instead, the left advocates statism, not individual freedom.