Will wonders never cease? John Kerry, “reporting for duty” in Copenhagen, will travel there by commercial airliner. Read all about it: “Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) will travel to the United Nations global warming conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on a commercial airliner.”
The news here is that it is news at all. Senator Kerry will be emitting the same left-wing bromides as the rest of his flock: “Kerry believes that global warming is man-made and he is an advocate of the United States participating in a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” the the news story continues. “He backs the idea of paying billions of dollars to help ‘developing’ countries avoid the polluting path allegedly followed by the United States and other ‘developed’ nations.” I hope you appreciate those sly editorial quotation marks around “developing” and “developed.”
But while Senator Kerry joins the herd of independent minds decrying “global warming” (please note that pair of scare quotes, too), he is indulging in a little PR trick of going commercial (though, I’d wager, first class). Many of our rulers go by private plane. The London Telegraph estimated that some 1200 private planes would be descending upon Copenhagen to lament the large carbon footprints us little folk leave behind when we drive to work or heat our homes.
I hasten to add that I have nothing against private planes. It is my preferred mode of long-distance transport. If I had my druthers, I’d keep a G5 idling at all times in the Kimball driveway, right next to the spacious SUV, also idling at the ready.
But such arrangements, though certainly desirable, seem perpetually reserved for folks like Senators Kerry and Gore, not minnows like me. I don’t (much) mind that, though it is galling to have to listen to someone like Senator Kerry or Gore bleat on about the evils of carbon emission when their own carbon emission is about the size of a small city.
The real issue behind the Extra! Extra! Read-all-about-it news that John Kerry was planning to travel with hoi polloi to Copenhagen concerns the increasing distance of our political class. Not paying your taxes seems almost a prerequisite for holding high office these days and more and more the people we used to refer to without irony as “public servants” live by rules designed for them but not for us. As I write, Congress is contemplating a statist assault on the American health care system that, in my judgment, will result in poorer heath care at a much greater — indeed, at a hideous — cost. As has been often pointed out, Congress itself will not have to avail itself of this plan: no, it will continue to receive its own gold-plated version of health care.
That double standard, though dismaying, is only part of the issue. My own suspicion, which I have aired several times in this space, is that the unspoken goal of this obscene intervention into the daily lives — not to mention the daily pocketbooks — of most Americans is only incidentally concerned with health care or health insurance. What it is really about is expanding government control over your life, which is in itself reason enough to oppose it tooth and claw, root and branch.
Roger, the answer concerning why nanny statism is making a comeback, is axiomatic.
Baby Boomers.
In the 60′s, they were young, vibrant and fighting for independence. They wanted freedom from sexual mores, glass ceilings…ceilings of any type, the right to party hearty and live on the edge of hedonism’s doorstep. They didn’t want to wear underwear and they wanted sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Now, some forty years later…they are looking at needing a nanny. If they wear underwear…Depends.
They are no longer worried about a ceiling, but they are concerned about having a floor.
The drugs they want now are Viagra, Ambien and Xanax.
No longer seeking independence, but rather, state sponsored dependence. Socialism is the vehicle, the “clapper” of political systems, for those whose will to achieve has fallen and can’t get up.
Toothless, hairless, chubby, dependent, helpless and wrinkled describes babies and baby boomers. And socialism is mother’s milk.
National health care is a several trillion dollar binky. And, by whining, mewling and puking…they can have their bottles, after first being given a little global warming.
Baby boomers. A generation of bad gas…that can’t pass through fast enough.
I hope when Kerry gets to Dopenhagen he asks “where can I get me a huntin’ license” just to fill in a few more strokes of his pathetic populist painting. Could there be a man, even an avowed Francophile, more out of touch with his fellow Americans. Or a party more deeply commited to blind ideology than the Dims for proposing such a preposterous human as their pres candidate. We should have seen through these frauds long before the era of the O. “Reporting for duty” indeed.
Please, quickly change their to there before the troll has the chance to be right about something!
Who is paying for the 1st class ticket? I’ll bet Kerry is not. Could it be “we”?
What would you have him do, go fly a kite?
What would you have him do, go fly a kite?
He should take a leaf from Falcon Heene and go by hot-air balloon.
An interesting excursus in that Tocqueville’s stage-coach travels were subsidized courtesy of Congress via the budding mail service. It’s doubtful that he would have been able—or at least so inclined—to venture “among [the] savage woods” without them.
Ah, yeah, and lo but we have largely felled the trees since his day and still no clearer in our sight. Such is ever the way with ‘myopia’…