Fresh from his diplomatic triumph in handing the Middle East over to Russia, America's buffoonish Secretary of State, John Kerry, took his sad-clown act to Indonesia, where he somehow contrived to link a volcanic eruption to man-made global warming. But that's not even the dumbest gesture an Obama Administration official has made toward the official government religion of the United States recently.
No, the winning act of devotion to the Church of Global Warming is President Obama blaming drought in California on the Angry Sky Gods. It might just be the dumbest thing any American president has ever said. It's so far opposed to actual science that Obama might as well have blamed elves and trolls for the drought, and announced a billion-dollar initiative to hunt them down. Not even the more respectable pseudo-scientists of the Church think the California drought has anything to do with global warming.
In fact, it's yet another example of a problem Big Government created, and now offers itself as the solution to. This is a reliable mechanism for the growth of the socialist super-State. Government meddles in the lives of its citizens, creates a problem that marinates for several years, and then shows up to declare that only even bigger, and even less rational, statist controls can clean up the mess it created.
Health care is the paramount example of this, a decades-long bid for total socialist power that began with wage controls decades ago. Because of those wage controls, health insurance became a hyper-regulated benefit linked to employment, rather than something Americans purchase and own individually. The buyer was separated by growing layers of corporate and government bureaucracy from the product, creating the confusing and frightening environment that Barack Obama's Even Bigger Government stepped in to "solve" with ObamaCare - itself a program designed from the ground up to fail, producing a radioactive meltdown that will pave the way for The Biggest Government You've Ever Seen to nationalize all of medicine.
The California drought is a comparable scheme, using the reliable pretext of global-warming fanaticism. Investor's Business Daily explains:
President Obama visited California's drought-hit Central Valley Friday, offering handouts and blaming global warming. But the state's water shortage is due to the left's refusal to deal with the state's water needs.
Following legislative action last month by Speaker John Boehner and California's Central Valley Representatives David Valadao, Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy, whose Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act was designed to resolve the long-standing problem of environmental water cutbacks that have devastated America's richest farmland, Obama is grandstanding in California, too.
His aim, however, is not a long-term solution for California's now-constant water shortages that have hit its $45 billion agricultural industry, but to preach about global warming. Instead of blaming the man-made political causes of California's worst water shortage, he's come with $2 billion in "relief" that's nothing but a tired effort to divert attention from fellow Democrats' dereliction of duty in using the state's water infrastructure.
Where did all the water go? Radical environmentalists stole it. Literally. You might remember the first stage of this disaster from headlines about the delta smelt in years past. It's "man-caused," all right, but it has nothing to do with cars and air conditioners pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
Environmental special interests managed to dismantle the system by diverting water meant for farms to pet projects, such as saving delta smelt, a baitfish. That move forced the flushing of 3 million acre-feet of water originally slated for the Central Valley into the ocean over the past five years.
That hasn't helped the smelt any. But that doesn't seem to matter to Obama or his environmentalist friends.
The shutdown has been made worse by the inaction of California's Democrats, who for years have refused to build adequate storage facilities so that rainwater and snowmelt runoff can be stored for use by a growing population during dry years, another element of the earlier system. With no storage, the rain goes wasted.
And the next thing you know, an opportunistic socialist President turns up, spouting crackpot anti-science gobbledygook and using a problem created by his ideology to seize more money and power.
This is one of the reasons Americans should always be deeply suspicious of Big Government, and jealous of the resources it seeks to confiscate. One of the things Big Government will most reliably do with any large store of money or power we surrender is create problems it can rush in to "solve" at a later date. Sometimes it's just a consequence of ideological blindness, as politicians and bureaucrats eagerly service their favorite special interests (who they naturally refuse to describe as "special interests") and leave wreckage in their wake. And sometimes, as with the Affordable Care Act, the sabotage is deliberate. Either way, the end result is the same, arriving with the words President Reagan described as the nine most terrifying in the English language: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
