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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2009-01-21

There. I'm Done Celebrating 

Congratulation to President Obama.

He managed to keep his Inaugural Speech under 20 minutes.

Acually, I didn't see the speech. Nor did I hear it. I find that I've fallen victim to the same sort of delusion that the "professional journalists" suffer when listening to Obama: after 8 years of listening to Pres. Bush stumble on his own syntax, Obama's ability to complete a sentence with tempo and cadence makes him sound intellgent and reasonable. Intelligent, he certainly is.

Reasonable? That's a different sort of question.

So, instead, I printed up the speech at the soonest possible point in the day, and read it. And was throughly unimpressed.

There was no high rhetoric. No call to great deeds and national greatness. And the fact that he could not refrain from taking a couple subtle shots at George Bush was rather startling and off-putting. And there were no great, memorable lines. All-in-all, a rather pedestrian effort.

But there is one line that has stuck with me since I first saw it on the page, and it is, I assume, a harbinger of bad things for conservatives.

"We will restore science to its rightful place . . ."

Sure, it seems like a throwaway line, but I'm guessing the implications of that throwaway are enormous.

First, I would expect sometime very soon that President Obama will issue an Executive Directive freeing the remaining embryonic stem cells in government care to be opened up for research. This, in spite of the science that increasingly tells us that adult stem cells are both pluripotent and generations ahead of embryonic stem cells in their development for theraputic purposes.

Second, Kyoto 2.0 is coming to a neighborhood near you SOON! This, in spite of the science of a growing community of climate scientists who say that global warming is NOT the relsult of human action, but part of a regular cycle the earth goes through.

I don't know what else will go along with these directives. But be clear: the moment of national unity will be brief, and while Obama will continue to talk smoothly and inclusively, his followers could not give the least bit of a crap about what conservatives think, feel or want.

Welcome to the wilderness. Bring your own beverage.
Posted by: Michael / 1/21/2009 01:15:00 AM

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