James Delingpole: If the leader of the free world can lie with such impunity we are doomed

James Delingpole: If the leader of the free world can lie with such impunity we are doomed

Earlier this week in his State of the Union address President Obama made some observations on climate change so brimming with falsehoods I'm surprised his nose didn't fall off.

It really doesn't matter where he himself was deliberately lying or whether he was merely lending the gravitas of his office to the deliberate lies of others. The point is that the President of the USA has access to any number of fact checkers and advisers and if he stands up and addresses the nation with a farrago of complete untruths then the buck stops with him. This dissembling and mendacity becomes all the more culpable when it forms the basis of major public policy decisions which will have a serious impact on people's lives in the US and beyond.

So why this snake-oil salesman being allowed to get away with it?

Here's the offending part of Obama's speech.

Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.

And here's Marc Morano's unanswerable point by point rebuttal. Obama's war on climate change is a war against a chimera. He is enlarging the state, holding back the economic recovery, restricting freedoms, driving up the price of energy and killing jobs in order to deal with a problem which only exists in the discredited computer projections of a shameless cabal of grant-troughing activist scientists increasingly out of touch with real world data.

So why, outside the internet, has no one called him on it?

The answer, I think, lies partly within the question. The internet, it seems to me, is the last bastion of truth in a world corrupted beyond measure.

Who is standing up for Rachel Frosch? Just a bunch of political bloggers and Tweeters.

Who is exposing the lies of the climate change industry? Bloggers, mostly.

Who kept the story of the Obama administration's shameful betrayal of the embassy staff it allowed to be murdered in Benghazi? Conservative bloggers, again – though with support from conservative journals like the American Spectator, which has a must-read piece on the subject here.

I'll tell you what I fear. I think we have now reached that stage of last-days-of-the-Roman-Empire intellectual and moral depravity where almost no one in our dominant corporate/political/financier/lawyer class believes it's worthwhile or even possible to do the right thing any more. Some of them may be vaguely aware that, yes, the only way the world is ever going to recover from the economic mess we're in is through a radical agenda of cost-cutting, contraction of the state, sound money, and lower taxes. But they've made up their minds that none of this is a votewinner in our heavily socialised Western economies and that therefore the only hope is simply to grab what you can while you still can – and forget any fancy, idealistic notions you may have had about making the world a better place.

It disgusts me so much I wonder why I bother. Indeed, if I had my life over again, I don't think I would. I'd train as a lawyer. I'd be running an energy fund with close links to government. I'd be Al Gore or Dale Vince.

Seriously, does anyone have an answer to what I've written here?