I Am Tony's Complete Lack of Surprise

I usually steer clear of politics in the blog, because it raises my blood pressure and loses me friends. For instance, I stayed quiet when people, including people I know and like, were saying all sorts of insulting and ridiculously untrue things about the lack of civility on the right compared to the left after the recent shooting.

But this is just ignorant. Some of Barack Obama's supporters are complaining that there was no substantive plan for job creation in his SOTU speech last night.

Well, what did they expect? Number one, Obama's never had a substantive plan for anything. At all. His foreign policy plans have all boiled down to "I'ma talk them into stuff cause I'm, like, awesome."

And number two, he thinks he is focusing on jobs. He just doesn't know how. The boilerplate he regurgitated last night was substantially the same as the economic "recovery" plans he spouted during his campaign for President--clean energy, infrastructure, health care--with the exception that he got the health care part passed.

That's what's been so simultaneously frustrating and amusing about disillusioned moderates and independents complaining that Obama spent so much time in his first two years pushing health care and cap-and-trade instead of focusing on the economy. He was focusing on the economy.

When Obama was asked about economic issues on the campaign trail, he would inevitably end up talking about health care and clean energy as necessary prerequisites to building a stable, prosperous economy. He never really supported his contention that these things needed to be done first. He would simply say, "The first thing you've got to do..." and then go into his plans for medicine and energy and infrastructure "investments" to put the economy on a "solid foundation."

Maybe people figured he was just doing that media-consultant-driven thing where you turn any question to your big central theme, like Jack Kemp somehow turning a question on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a call for a flat tax. But I always figured that on some level, he really did believe what he was saying, no matter how stupid. What's sad for the country is that so many people were lulled by the mellow tones of his voice into ignoring the very ignorant crap he was saying.

So let's get a few things straight about Obama's nonsense. Number one, the health care law he got passed is not going to make health care better or more affordable, nor will it help the economy or job production. Even the people on his side have abandoned that fiction.

And number two, clean energy is not going to be some economic salvation, certainly not in the short term, and possibly not in the long-term either. Just the opposite, in fact. And I'm not just talking about the fact that any job gained in the "clean energy" industry is a job lost in the current petroleum and coal industries, making the whole thing a wash from the start.

Wind and solar energy are more costly and less reliable than fossil fuels, which is why they aren't more prevalent. The only way to make them cost-effective barring some amazing imaginary future technical breakthrough is to drive up the cost of fossil fuels through regulations and punitive taxation, which Obama admitted in rare moments of candor on the campaign trail. This drives up the prices of all goods and services, depresses the economy, causes more job losses. Worse still, it disproportionately hurts the poor, those downtrodden masses the left are continually throwing up as the justification for more and more government excess. The truth is, the left cares nothing about the poor except as a bludgeon to lash out at the things they're mad about.

The problem is not that Barack Obama has not been concentrating on the unemployment disaster. The problem is that he has no idea what a real job is, nor how to create one. He's like a cargo cultist, building something that looks like a runway in the jungle in the hopes that planes will land there once again. His speech last night was not an abandonment of the "laser-like focus" on jobs he's been promising every couple of months since he was sworn in. It was a demonstration of what his idea of focus on jobs looks like.