Drawing Back the Curtain on the World's Political Classes
This week, President Trump showed once again that, unlike his predecessor, he reads the fine print, and is not swayed by the unscientific blather of the internationalists who use fine talk to cover power-grabbing, anti-Americanism, and corruption.
He wisely pulled out of the Paris Accord -- something always billed as a perfectly voluntary agreement of nations. Had it been more transparently called a "treaty" the “Accord” would never have passed even minimal scrutiny and constitutionally mandated Senate approval. So it combines bad science, bad economics, and bad politics.
Here are some of the provisions, not reported by the mainstream press, which underscore that it was no more than a redistribution scheme designed to hamper U.S. competitiveness papered over by gaseous, meaningless platitudes about saving mankind.
It was designed to limit American competitiveness and, at best, could have done virtually nothing to affect the climate while impoverishing us and displacing U.S. workers.
[L] isten to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.
For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn't really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that "the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated."
Mad as they are, Edenhofer's comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement's dirty secret. Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement.
"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said in anticipation of last year's Paris climate summit.
If you had any doubt about the redistribution aim, consider this: To date the U.S. has contributed $1 billion to the Accord's "Green Fund" and all the other signatories have contributed exactly nothing to it.
Neither President Donald Trump nor his secretary of state is confused about the country he represents nor stupid enough to believe that he represents Paris rather than Pittsburgh. Unlike those two, they read the fine print.
If I had a single complaint about Trump’s well-presented statement on withdrawing from the Accord, it would be that he neglected to note that the United States has been able to achieve greater environmental protection and energy efficiency precisely because the benefits of our economic system provide needed capital for such advances in environmental protection. Surplus capital put into research and new technologies does more for the planet than surplus cash in the pockets of Euro autocrats and their friends.
By way of example, energy producers and users in the U.S. have also been able to reduce emissions because natural gas is more economical, not because Juncker and his pals ordered it.
In curbing global-warming emissions, economics will pick up where President Donald Trump left off.
Trump might have just pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, an international pact to fight global warming. But market forces will continue to squeeze carbon dioxide out of the U.S. power mix as generators replace costly and aging coal-fired units with cheaper, cleaner-burning natural gas ones, according to William Nelson, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And for every megawatt-hour of electricity produced from gas rather than coal, the U.S. is keeping about 0.6 metric ton of emissions out of the air, he said.
Once again, like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, Trump has drawn away the curtain that hid from the public the knowledge that the Wizard was simply a goofy old fat guy with his hands on the levers.
If Obama really thought the Accord was something Americans wanted, why didn’t he follow the Constitution and get Senate approval? His party held the reins then. Maybe because he thought he was too clever?
The Constitution requires the Senate to ratify treaties by a two-thirds supermajority in part to ensure that the United States speaks with a single, consistent voice on the international stage. It was President Obama who offered the world an unwise commitment for which he got nothing in return. It was Obama who refused to submit that commitment for Senate approval because he knew he did not have it.
Did he rely on the blinkered Department of State to help him avoid the clear terms of the Constitution? If the agreement was purely voluntary and did not bind us as treaty would have, why the need to publicly withdraw from It? Well, Andy McCarthy explains the trick Obama tried to pull off:
...in 1970, President Richard M. Nixon signed a monstrosity known as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Think of it as “the treaty on treaties” -- even though you probably thought we already had an American law of treaties.
Under Article 18 of the treaty on treaties, once a nation signs a treaty -- or merely does something that could be interpreted as “express[ing] its consent to be bound by the treaty” -- that nation is “obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of the treaty.”
In other words, the Constitution notwithstanding, once a presidential administration signs or otherwise signals assent to the terms of an international agreement, the United States must consider itself bound – even though the Senate has not approved it, even though it has not been ratified.
If a subsequent president wants to get the United States out from under this counter-constitutional strait-jacket, it is not enough merely to refrain from submitting the treaty to the Senate. The later president must take an affirmative action that withdraws the prior president’s assent. That is why Trump cannot not just ignore the Paris agreement; he needs to openly and notoriously pull out of it.[snip] How does that square with the Constitution? Wrong question. The right one, apparently, is: Who needs the Constitution when you have the State Department? That bastion of transnational progressives advises that, despite the lack of ratification under our Constitution, “many” of the treaty on treaties’ provisions are binding as -- what else? -- “customary international law.”
President Trump is taking a significant step in removing the United States from the Paris agreement. But the step should not be significant, or politically fraught, at all. President Obama’s eleventh-hour consent to the agreement’s terms should have been nothing more consequential than symbolic pom-pom waving at his fellow climate alarmists. It should have had no legal ramifications.
The stock market reached new highs after Trump’s announcement. Scot Adams tweeted:
“Trump pulls out of Paris Accord, stocks rise. Why isn't the end of civilization priced into the market?”
As “Miss Marple” observes:
The most amazing thing about this election is how the curtains have been drawn back and we see people for what they really are. I have never seen anything like it.
Most of the political class thrives on deception and role-playing. For some reason, President Trump causes them to blurt out revealing comments and take actions, which reveal who they really are. It's almost like they can't help it.
National Review and The Weekly Standard could have simply talked about policy and critiqued some of Trump's platform without anyone thinking a thing about it. Instead, they went all in with mocking and demonizing him and continue to do so today. Why did they do that?
What keeps Ben Sasse and Paul Ryan posing as virtuous nebbishes who look down on their own voters? Why does John McCain tour the world like some second rate Bond villain, making snarky comments about the President and hanging out with dubious foreign characters?
The democrats are in an even worse position, because they have been revealed not only as elitists but as completely insane. I don't care whether we are talking about Hillary, or Tom Perez, or Debbie Wasserman-Schultz; they come off as completely unhinged.
It's the most amazing thing in politics I have ever seen.
No one has proven more unhinged by events than Hillary Clinton. So far, despite taking “responsibility” for her loss, Hillary has placed the blame on 35 other people, events, and organizations, including her own DNC.
There’s no one else left for her to blame. May I suggest another: aliens from the planet Zorg abducted her would-be voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania on election day, then prodded and probed them into voting for Trump.
Like the EU leaders, she is too corrupt, incompetent, and unliked to be elected in her native land. And like them, she is cosseted by her retainers from knowing the truth.
Kyle Smith shows us how far removed from reality Hillary has become and why:
The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her as though she actually were the president, or the secretary of state, or a president in waiting, or at very least the leader of the opposition. Her longtime loyalists are so happy to bustle around her in the service of maintaining the illusion that, after she takes an hour away from it all to exercise, her communications director, Nick Merrill, breathlessly updates her on everything that’s happened in the political world in the last threescore ticks of the minute hand. Her profiler, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine, obviously a great admirer but one who declines to throw herself overboard from reality for the sake of giving Hillary more company bobbing about in the sea of fancy, writes that Clinton “listens to the barrage of updates, nodding like a person whose job requires her to be up-to-date on what’s happening, even though it does not.” Ouch. Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t merely in a state of denial. She has become Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Politically speaking, she is dead, but she doesn’t know it. Her staffers are so many Haley Joel Osments -- too kind (and too attached to their salaries) to tell her that her career is over. She doesn’t need briefings. She doesn’t need to do interviews. She doesn’t need to write the book she is writing (after so many indigestible volumes, why bother with one more?). She doesn’t need to stake out a politically nuanced position on James Comey’s firing or scramble to get out in front of the Resistance parade. She lost two exceedingly winnable presidential campaigns in Hindenburgian fashion. There is no demand for her to run again and there is nothing left for her except to receive whatever ceremonial honors and sinecures may come her way. She has been handed her political retirement papers by the American people. She’s done.
Also dead or almost dead, given the multitude of “investigations” pending, is her claim that the Russians did it. If you care to know the way in which this was confected and how stupid and counterfactual this is, the very best explanation is here. The meticulously documented timeline makes clear that “the corruption and manipulation of the 2016 election (and the months afterward) were the result of Leftist chicanery and not the fault of the Trump team.”
What remains of the Russian fairytale is the apparent widespread illegal use of the intelligence agencies and unmasking of Obama’s political opposition -- this week, even Senator Lindsey Graham indicated that he, too, had been illegally surveilled and unmasked. In the wake of the Democrats big lie, engendered by Hillary Clinton’s Norma Desmond-like refusal to acknowledge reality, the Democrats, Obama officials, and their media friends have done more to undermine America’s regard and trust of our intelligence agencies than the Russians could have ever hoped to accomplish.
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