Obama's Achilles Heels

President Obama’s administration is finally seeing what happens where the rubber meets the road. His charisma is nice, but he is the Democratic donkey with four Achilles heels. Any one of them can bring him down. The front two heels are the economy/deficit and his health care initiative. Enough has been said about those. The hind heels, however, are looking more and more tenuous. Climate Change and Afghanistan are festering. It doesn’t look good.

Last week, the entire climate change debate collapsed when hackers hacked into the computers at Britain’s East Anglia Climate Research Unit. Just in case you aren’t familiar with what the CRU is, let’s say it is to Climate Change proponents what the Vatican is to Catholics. It is the proverbial belly of the beast.

The emails and reports are stunning in their display of manipulation of scientific research to achieve a political end. It is worth taking the time to read some of them. The CRU operatives discard studies that don’t agree with their view. They demonize legitimate scientists whose work contradicts their political agenda. And even scarier, they gin up… translate: fudge…the data to match what they think the data should show. In an even worse case scenario, these guys “lost” the basic research data, and only kept records of the “revised” data which had been massaged to reach the proper conclusions. In effect, global warming aka climate change is a manipulated hoax.

The CRU operatives responded by saying that other scientists have arrived independently at the same conclusions. Unfortunately, many of them used studies and data provided to them, or that had been sanitized, by the East Anglia CRU. Scientists wanting to do contra-studies have been “frozen out” of the scientific communities and research money. The debate about global warming is over! The only issue is to how to stop it! So there!!!

Unfortunately, Obama has taken the same position. Global warming is scientific fact. There is no disagreement. We must press forward or the earth will be destroyed. That was the tenor of Press Secretary Gibbs statements relating to the rapidly collapsing global warming house of cards. They just can’t admit it. Hello! Carbon Dioxide is plant food. The earth has natural warming and cooling cycles, and we are going into a cooling cycle…and the CO(2) levels in the atmosphere during the last two ice ages were higher than they are now, or projected to be, in the future.

If Obama presses forward with his Cap and Trade legislation, and other such initiatives based on punishment of the United States and the transfer of billions upon billions of dollars of wealth to third world countries, he will be run out of Washington on a rail. Even worse than the anger that will be directed towards him as utility and petroleum bills skyrocket, he will be trivialized. He should go to Copenhagen get his Nobel Peace prize, and skip the climate change conference which is now a joke.

In the midst of everything else, a President whose political roots are in social justice/peacenik activism now has to send soldiers into war. According to Obama, Iraq was a war of choice and Afghanistan was a war of necessity. I guess it depends on who is sitting in the Oval Office and when. While our troops are dying on the Afghan/Pakistani border, Obama was out playing golf and being President of the world, ignoring troop level requests from his hand-picked general.

What is he worried about? A corrupt Afghan government! Do ya’ think? There is no good choice in Afghanistan. The mission of smashing the enemy hiding in the mountains stands separate and apart from nation building. Our troops are going to be there for a long, long time. A corrupt Afghan government is a given. The American military presence is required in case the semblance of government that is there collapses. The Taliban can never be in charge of Afghanistan again. At the end of the day, the bigger problems are a collapsed nuclear Pakistan and a nuclear Iran. For that reason alone, Afghanistan will on our radar for years to come.

On this issue, Obama loses on the right, which believes he will never do enough; and the left, which believes he will do too much.

The only remaining question is which one of Obama’s four Achilles heels will bring him down. Any bets?