…of Nikitas3.com

(Part 1 of 3)

We are in the trajectory of another Presidential election year, and the rhetoric is getting hot. With the nation polarized on many issues – though not nearly so much as just six months ago when Iraq was looking bleak and Bush was looking cooked – there is much focus on each and every word, wink and nod in the cornucopia of debates. And with Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton at one point refusing even to commit to a yes-or-no answer on whether she concurred with her own New York State governor over his plan to grant drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens, the voters are getting a genuine taste of the candidates beyond the beauty-pageant aspect of the coming race.

We are being told that 2008 is a “watershed” year, when the nation will decide whether to go this way or that on many critical issues, and indeed that is true. To add to the volatility, it appears that after 8 years of a Republican in the White House, along with the hard-leftward drift of the Democrats, the media are pressing for change more than ever, and will do everything possible to obscure the true positions of the Democrat candidates. When a very liberal Illinois Senator Barack Obama won’t talk specifics, but starts talking flowery about bringing the nation together in one big happy family, it’s time to pull out the nonsense meter and take a true reading of his intentions rather than allowing the media to gloss over his comments with swooning reviews of his style.

What we have learned since the “surge” and the turnaround in Iraq is that things indeed do change, sometimes quickly, and that 6 months indeed are a lifetime in politics. Eight whole years is a much bigger story. Americans today are highly focused for good reason on five urgent problems that were hardly on the radar screen in 2000. They are: Globalization and job competition in the world economy; the security of our energy supplies in the face of rising worldwide demand; the much-needed reform of a tottering Social Security system; the skyrocketing cost of health care; and the real threat of terrorism. Voters are looking for genuine answers, and those answers hardly are as simple as a presidential pledge… or a presidential fudge, like the former First Lady’s non-position on drivers’ licenses.

Hillary Clinton, who will be the Democrat nominee, has a plan for everything, and that plan is for an increasingly powerful government to take even more control of events. But our Founding Fathers warned against such acquiescence. “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations,” said James Madison, fourth President of the United States and the “father” of our Constitution.

Hillary is a leftist posing as a centrist and is reassuring us that her “plans” for the government to handle health care, to make crucial committee-like decisions on energy, to assure the solvency of Social Security, to direct economics and trade in the favor of labor unions, and to play it halfway on terrorism (as her husband did) will result in a more peaceful and equitable world for all. But nothing could be further from the truth. In the area of health care, for instance, we already are seeing a bad result. Here in Massachusetts, a public health-care plan introduced just one year ago (authored by Republican Mitt Romney, by the way) is producing much opposition and confusion because of a host of threats from the state to sign up or else. This will be the way of any federal plan. On the surface, we will be led to believe that a benevolent government will take care of our health when in fact it will produce a massive lowering of quality and a coercive bureaucratic government bullying the people. Just as Madison warned.

On national defense and terrorism, Hillary voted for the Iraq war, but since then has skipped all over the political map on that question. She does not have the courage to truly confront terrorism as Bill Clinton did not after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Rather than pursue the WTC terrorists and their friends with all the might of federal law-enforcement power, Mr. Clinton essentially kicked the can down the road, and 9/11 was the result. Meanwhile Senator Obama’s pander to engage every tyrant in dialogue is hardly reassuring. And the Democrats’ far-left anti-Guantanamo and anti-eavesdropping cohort would pressure Hillary to go easy on terror suspects when that is precisely what we should not be doing. It is time to step up the pressure now that we have the terrorists on the run in many places around the world, including Iraq.

On energy, the Democrats, at the urging of their ultra-wealthy environmentalist contributors including the elites in Hollywood, are going to continue to obstruct our energy supplies like the 15 billion barrels of oil in ANWR in Alaska. Their goal is to push us cold-turkey into “alternative energy”, but the virtual collapse in many places of the biofuels and ethanol industries (to be addressed in a coming Nikitas3.com editorial) just a few short years into their much-hyped global rollouts should be a warning to us all that there are myriad hidden dangers in the “soft” energy path.

These “renewable” energy sources never can provide the amounts of power we need, are at best economically marginal, and always are at the mercy of government subsidies, which ultimately will produce a dead end. Despite the wishful thinking of enviros, we will continue to rely on the powerhouse sources of coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear for the next hundred years, and the Democrats are loath to admit it at the same time that they themselves are pushing up prices by restricting supplies. And they will continue down that path to the detriment of every American, rich, poor and in between.

We Americans need to start today to develop our “hard” energy resources. There currently are 32 new nuclear plants on order, and this number should be increased substantially since we have 30 years of catching up to do after the phony “disaster” of Three Mile Island, which left a total of zero people dead… but all America frightened to death. Wind energy, one megawatt at a time, can never power our modern economy. We need thousands of megawatts at a clip. Instead of 1,000 one-megawatt windmills dotting hundreds of mountaintops, how about one small nuclear reactor for the same amount of power at a much, much lower enviro impact?