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Eight months ago in April 2009 I posted the following reply which I think anticipates much of Dr. Hansen's remarks:

... his[Obama's] decision [to prohibit domestic drilling] costs America countless jobs and countless tens of billions of dollars in our balance of payment account. It weakens the dollar. It increases the deficit and debt. It funds those oil producers like Saudi Arabia who fund terrorists with more petrodollars. It enriches tyrants like Hugo Chavez who might otherwise go bankrupt and enables them to make alliances with tyrants like Putin to undermine American security by placing nuclear bombers in Venezuela. It supports tyrants like Putin who might otherwise go bankrupt and who supplies Iran with nuclear technology and invades his neighbors. It makes America more dependent on foreign energy. It leaves America more vulnerable to terrorists. It prolongs and deepens the recession. It makes America vulnerable.

This decision is so inimical to America's national interests that I can conceive of only two reasons why a man who has been entrusted by the people with their security and their prosperity would make such a decision.

First, Obama could be a committed ideologue who is determined to break the United States away from fossil fuels and switch our economy over to wind and solar. (One notes that he has not opted for nuclear, having declared the waste problem prevents that.) He is willing to suffer the costs identified in the first paragraph at a time when America is facing a historic financial crisis which involves real suffering by his people who are out of work. The hold of this ideology on the President is so strong that he cannot even countenance domestic drilling not even only until the financial crisis has passed.

The second possible reason is that the president has cold bloodedly calculated that his energy policy, when considered in pari materia with cap and trade will so dislocate the economy and produce so much chaos which he will exploit and move the country towards Marxism.

I leave the reader to make his choice or to furnish a third or fourth more benign explanation for what the president is doing. Whatever motivation has prompted this action, it is clear that his ideological commitment, whether green or red, is so strong that he will never be deterred by reason. I also suggest that if his motivation were merely to forward the green goals of eliminating emissions of fossil fuels, Barak Obama would opt for atomic energy. That he has not suggests that his posture is a sham calculated to advance the revolution.

He is willing to suffer the costs identified in the first paragraph at a time when America is facing a historic financial crisis which involves real suffering by his people who are out of work.

I don't think he cares about or empathizes with any of his fellow Americans.

We are just props in the Great Obama Drama.

I write, repeatedly, on this forum that He is not one of Us. He truly identifies more with the outsiders, than the natives, as he spent his formative years unconnected with this country.

His roommates, while at Columbia U, were Pakistanis.

His church was anti-American.

His associates in Chicago were Iraqis and Palestinians.

He is in way over his head, and has fallen back on the phrases quoted at bull sessions in college, or as Walter Williams put it, "he's 19 going on 48."

Liberalism has the same effect that drugs have on one's mind: it stifles mature thinking.

That's why he comes off like a frat boy in his speech and mannerisms.

>>>The second possible reason is that the president has cold bloodedly calculated that his energy policy, when considered in pari materia with cap and trade will so dislocate the economy and produce so much chaos which he will exploit and move the country towards Marxism.<<<

Sadly, I think this is the strategy. It’s called a “manufactured crisis.” Since this is the United States, I don’t see something like the manufactured crisis that happened in Russia in 1917, but that’s the template. I would sense that we’ll see glacial movement towards totalitarianism, a movement so incremental that the structure will be in place long before anyone actually uses it in a Soviet manner. It’ll be one thing after another, and the solution will always steer us toward a statist solution run by Democrat Party supporters or sycophants. We’ll keep our guns, but slowly over time more and more of us will be “ineligible” for gun ownership, in the same way that a person convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence right now can’t own a gun. We’ll keep our churches, but our institutions will steer citizens away from it. We’ll be able to listen to Rush, as long as the station can file the proper paperwork showing that it reflects the community, and slowly over time fewer and fewer communities will reflect that viewpoint. We’ll get used to 10 percent unemployment, and then 20 percent unemployment, maybe, as long as benefits don’t dry up. We’ll be glad to have a job, even if it means working for the state. The state will help us get money for college, and teach us the right way, and provide us a mortgage, and sell us the right kind of car, and turn our thermostats up and down for us, and provide us with medical care, and create hospices for end of life concerns, in slow, measured steps. When the Republicans win in 2010, the ideas will still be there, and the left will be waiting again for another crisis to further push their way towards the growth of the state.

Those of us who remember liberty and freedom will be considered doddering old men pining away for a racist past. And when we die, no one will remember.