RUTHFULLY YOURS

TIA Daily • June 16, 2010

FEATURE ARTICLE

Australia’s Obama

The Rise and Fall of Kevin Rudd—and What It Implies for Obama and the Oil Spill by Tom Minchin

Barack Obama and Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd both belong to a new class of leftist leaders: postmodern ones. This distinguishes them from either the Old Left or the New Left. The Old Left (led by men like Franklin Roosevelt) were class-warfare-focused but claimed to believe in economic progress: they said they wanted a modern world with the government in control of the means of production. The New Left (the hippies and their contemporary descendants, the Greens) witnessed the failure of that socialist/fascist ideal in every country it was tried and, in bitterness, threw economic progress overboard to adopt a policy of living at the mercy of nature.

Unsurprisingly, the New Left failed to attract wide support. Its contempt for human survival was too apparent. Thus the postmodern left was born. The postmodern left combines a thirst for an ever-growing centralized government power with cunning levels of disguise to appear to be all things to all men. Hostility to science is wrapped in the language of science (global warming theory). The shackling of capitalism is dressed up as saving it (the stimulus packages). Hostility to US predominance is dressed up as a desire for a new world order in which US strength is “restraint.” In fact, under all its disguises, the postmodern left believes in nothing but power for itself and the weakening of the institutions of the West. The common denominator of its policies: ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, the takeover and regulation of big business, internationalism, isolation of Israel, fawning over enemies and taking tough lines against their allies, is: Western disempowerment.

This is why Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd are both dynamite on their respective nations but greatly strengthen foreign enemies.

The protection for their agenda has been its sheer unbelievability. Few Western citizens thought postmodern leaders intended to persist in their destructiveness once the drawbacks of their programs were pointed out. How many thought Obama would continue with his health care program against overwhelming public resistance and in the face of the loss of Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat—an effective referendum on his policy? But he did. In Australia, Prime Minister Rudd was no sooner crushingly defeated on one means of shackling the Australian economy (cap-and-trade) than he singled out the most efficient industry in Australia—mining—to hit with a brand new 40% tax on Super Profits—a “Super Profit” being defined as any profit above a 6% return. (It is no accident that the term “Super Profit” was coined by Lenin.)

But the power of Obama and Rudd has peaked and is now in sharp decline. Both have gone from approval ratings around the 70% mark to the 40s. It is worth understanding why.

In the first place their irrationality and economic wastefulness has galvanized the pro-freedom side of politics. In America it is the Tea Party movement. In Australia it is the supporters of capitalism and the best of the media (Andrew Bolt and The Australian newspaper) who are leading an increasingly successful resistance. While seeing clearly the flaws in the right-leaning opposition party (the Liberal-National parties in coalition) they are relentless in exposing the Rudd government’s lies, deceptions, and failings. See Andrew Bolt’s 2-million-hits-a-month blog <http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/>  for evidence.

Yet ironically it will probably not be the people who saw through Obama and Rudd right from the start who bring them down. What may be the undoing of both leaders is the disillusionment of those who believed in them most, in the area of their biggest lies: the environment. As Rob Tracinski has pointed out <http://www.intellectualactivist.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1175> , a US president has no business micro-managing the cleanup or even the prevention of an oil spill. Yet Obama, like Rudd over his Emissions Trading Scheme, has raised his supporters’ expectations. Obama is the man who claimed he could, just by his nomination, cause the oceans to lower. Now he can’t even prevent them from carrying the spill of a single oil rig.

The bubble is bursting for him not because he has disappointed real expectations but because he dealt in unreality all along, and his followers are betrayed because the unreal is the unreal and never had any value.

So it is with Kevin Rudd. He claimed to believe more than anyone in human-caused global warming. He called it the “great moral challenge of our age.” Yet he has abandoned it because he hasn’t had the guts to carry out his threat of dissolving both houses of parliament to pass bitterly opposed legislation—knowing he would fail. Now it is his most ardent supporters who are abandoning him. Take the leading climate alarmist Tim Flannery who will be a model for many an Obama supporter. As the Australian News website reported <http://tinyurl.com/2e53vbm> :

Tim Flannery, a former Australian of the Year, said he was unlikely to vote Labor again after Mr Rudd shelved plans for an emissions trading scheme.

“It’s a profound betrayal of the person I voted for,” Professor Flannery said at a conference in Canberra.

“Politicians only have one thing that they trade in, which is trust … unfortunately my trust in the party’s been corroded.”

Rudd, like Obama, depended on a mystique. He was the leader who could do anything. Now his loss of confidence is causing all of his actions to have a touch of panic and he is floundering without support. The opposition to his big mining tax is growing daily.

Obama has gone one step further. He has promised a world where the government can control everything. Like Rudd since the failure of cap-and-trade, he will not even be able to control his own followers when the truth of his impotence over the Gulf oil spill stands fully revealed.

Tom Minchin is a writer, researcher, and businessman in Melbourne, Australia.