Soccer Dad

Hope 'n change in copenhagen

The ballad of Dennis Moore

Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore,
Riding through the night.
Soon every lupin in the land
Will be in his mighty hand
He steals them from the rich
And gives them to the poor
Mr Moore, Mr Moore, Mr Moore.

Dennis Moore has decided not to run for re-election, but his namesake's purpose lives on - in Copenhagen. Charles Krauthammer describes the climate conference in Copenhapen as a shakedown of the industrialized world, by the third world. He sees it as a replay of the "New International Economic Order" but with a green twist.

The idea of essentially taxing hardworking citizens of the democracies to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

Here's where he sums things up beautifully.

Politically it's an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man's guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt. But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale, too.

So the effort to shake down the United States, which failed legislatively, will now be attempted by the EPA, which has declared carbon dioxide - which is what we all exhale - a substance subject to its jurisdiction.

But is there any justification for this|? Is global warming such an immediate, certain and irreversible phenomenon that we must submit our lives to a government agency? Hmm, this is sounding a lot like Obama-care. And just as unattractive.