Barack Obama turns the oil spill into his poor man's 9/11 to revive Cap-and-Trade climate legislation

By Gerald Warner
The Telegraph
Jun. 16, 2010

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's chief of staff, famously remarked. “And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” The extent to which his master has absorbed this maxim is demonstrated by Obama's exploitation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

After obsessively demonising “British Petroleum”, as his administration calls BP -- a company 40 per cent British and 40 per cent American owned -- Obama plumbed new depths this week by comparing the accident to the Twin Towers atrocity in 2001. To equate an environmental accident in which 11 workers tragically lost their lives with a ferocious terrorist attack that killed 2,995 people, 67 of them British, shows the extent to which Obama has lost touch with reality.

His agenda is to exaggerate the significance of the oil spill crisis to massive proportions, for two reasons. The first is that, the more Americans can be persuaded to regard the accident as a monumental, historic disaster, the less his patent impotence in the face of it will appear blameworthy. His second reason is that, in accordance with the Emanuel doctrine, he sees this as an opportunity to breathe new life into his moribund Cap-and-Trade climate change legislation.

The House of Representatives narrowly passed the climate change Bill last year, but it has stalled in the Senate. Last month, in the wake of the BP oil rig explosion, Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced a “compromise” Bill in the Senate to which Obama is desperate to give a fair wind. He is trying to whip up a green frenzy, to persuade Americans of the evil of oil. Yet ironically, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reminded his colleagues last week, “it's been widely reported that a major part, a major part of the Kerry-Lieberman Bill was essentially written by BP”.

Cap-and-Trade is extremely difficult to pass in Congress, especially after the forcing through of the unpopular health care legislation, as more and more Americans begin to waken up to the consequences of Obama's climate change programme. A freedom of information initiative has disclosed that, in contradiction of claims made by the administration, a study by the US Department of Treasury estimated that Cap-and-Trade laws would impose new taxation of up to $200bn a year, equivalent to a 15 per cent increase in income tax.

That is why Obama is trying, very unconvincingly, to brainwash Americans into thinking they are facing a crisis as grave as 9/11 -- presumably casting BP as the new al-Qaeda -- in order to gain support for legislation that would ratchet up energy prices, destroy jobs and cause the economy to contract. The fact that he is reduced to so transparent an imposture is testimony to how dramatically his status and credibility have shrunk during his 17 months in office. The latest Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll has his Presidential Approval Index rating at a humiliating --18, with 42 per cent strongly disapproving of his performance and just 24 per cent strongly approving. It is that haemorrhaging of support in the run-up to mid-term elections, rather than the oil leak, that is Obama's real crisis.