Daniel Greenfield's article: An Ocean of Failure

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An Ocean of Failure Posted: 26 Jun 2014 04:20 PM PDT "This was the moment," Barack Obama had told the cheering audience in St. Paul, Minnesota. "When we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war." St. Paul has an Ocean Street. It has an Ocean Spa and Salon. It even has an Oceanaire Seafood Room. It does not however have an ocean. But with ObamaCare an unpopular subsidized failure, the few new jobs around being confined to a local McDonald's and Al Qaeda taking over Iraq; Obama has nothing left to do but to go back to his old promise of defeating the rise of the ocean. With Al Qaeda pressing in on Baghdad, Obama ruled out air strikes. He did however order the Department of Defense to assign a senior official to the vital task of fighting mislabeled seafood. While the Iraqi government was begging for air support, Obama instead issued an order in the name of the authority vested in him “by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America” to “ensure that seafood sold in the United States is legally and sustainably caught.” The United States Constitution does not have much to say about sustainable seafood. The Founders liked their flounder and they disliked kings and emperors telling them where to fish. King George III responded to Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty or give me death” with the Fisheries Bill which banned the fishermen of New England from the North Atlantic. A letter sent to a sea captain denounced it as, “A Bill so replete with inhumanity and cruelty… an everlasting stain on the annals of our pious Sovereign.” But not even King George III would have contemplated creating a “national monument” consisting of 782,000 square miles of water. And despite being a monarch, he did not unilaterally issue a ban, rather parliament did. Even during the American Revolution, King George III was a more lawful and democratic monarch than Obama’s unilateral reign of royal executive orders. Three percent of American tuna from the western and central Pacific comes from the waters of the latest national monument to Obama’s ideology. That means rising tuna prices which will hit working Americans, who already have trouble affording basic staples, even harder in the wallet. The average price of albacore in 2008 was $1.14 per pound. In 2011 it hit $1.94 per pound. It was amazing how much of a difference three years had made. And not just in the price of tuna. In 2008, Al Qaeda in Iraq was on the run and its leaders were being killed off one by one. Now that same organization is besieging Baghdad under a terrorist leader released by Barack Obama. Obama has declared war on fishermen in the Pacific Ocean, but the Constitution, which Obama had been ignoring as thoroughly as Al Qaeda in Iraq, mentions providing for the “common defense”. And it isn’t talking about sending out the troops to save the tuna from the fishermen. While ISIS Jihadists were tweeting photos of severed Iraqi heads, John Kerry was tweeting photos of himself with Leonardo DiCaprio. It was hard to decide which was more gruesome, the corpses or the sight of the country’s top diplomat fawning over an environmentalist movie star while the greatest terrorist crisis of his administration was reaching a critical point. As the Iraqi government begged for air strikes against Al Qaeda, Kerry instead held a Twitter chat to discuss the real national security threat. Rising oceans. Water level rise had begun slowing anyway, for reasons having nothing to do with Obama. That may have been why Obama refused to acknowledge it. Secretary of State John Kerry convened #OceanChat on Twitter to take questions about the great wavy threat of tidal terrorism. Most of the questions however came from people wondering why he was talking about the ocean and Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Al Qaeda. “How is it you have time to chat with Iraq in flames?” one user asked him. “What happens to our ocean is int'l security issue,” Kerry replied. Forget the terrorists and let’s fight the flounder. "Any awareness of climate change in Iraq-Iran?" PBS' Bill Nye asked him. "There is awareness in the Middle East - a number of countries engaged in transition," Kerry replied. The Middle East is certainly in transition, but not to Global Warming awareness. Al Qaeda is building its own state, but it doesn’t have a policy on Global Warming. It does however have one on murdering Americans. The rising oceans have yet to swallow St. Paul, Minnesota, but they have swallowed the Obama agenda. Obama has given up on doing the little things, like jobs, health care and defeating Al Qaeda, three things he was taking credit for just last month, and has refocused on the truly grandiose, controlling the oceans. King Xerses, known to most Americans as the bejeweled self-proclaimed deity of the movie 300, ordered the whipping of the sea when it wouldn’t obey him. But Obama wants to whip the ocean. Mere mortals like Bush might fight Al Qaeda. Obama wants to take on an enemy that can be trusted not to fight back because it doesn’t even know that he’s there. Battles are quantifiable things that have undeniable outcomes. You can instruct your press corps to claim victory when you are actually running away, as every ruler exercising unlimited power has, and as Obama did in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when the enemy takes the territory that you claimed was safe, it becomes harder for your media minions to claim that you actually won. Unlike Al Qaeda, oceans don’t throw victory parades. They rise and fall as part of a rhythm that predates the kingdoms of man. They will persist in their rhythms uncaring and unheeding of the bureaucrats and regulators, the peddlers of Green Luddite science, the celebrities and politicians who claim to control their waters. The ocean does all this without press releases. The Pacific will never mock Michelle Obama on Twitter the way that ISIS has and the Great Southern Ocean will never tweet photos of drowned Global Warming researchers who went to their deaths in its icy depths certain that the ice had melted. The mockery of the great deep is a more subtle and more enduring thing. That is why it is politically safer to hit the beach than Al Qaeda. It’s easier to grandstand on saving the world from an imaginary catastrophe (at the bargain price of a few mere trillion) than to deal with a real threat. After failing at jobs and health care, and abandoning the world to tyrants and terrorists, Obama has hitched up his pants to take on the ocean. And if the ocean doesn’t do what he tells it to, he can always send out the EPA’s crack SWAT team to have it whipped. Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.