By Isaac MacMillen
Barack Obama is going to get a lump of coal in his stocking this Christmas. His dubious intentions towards working-class Americans are beginning to show—and they may soon discover that he is not really with them when it comes to the vital, work-a-day necessities of “cutting the coal.”
Just this week, a video was released containing remarks that Senator Obama made early this year to the San Francisco Chronicle, in which he stated his apparent opposition to traditional coal-based power. The Democrat candidate said:
“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
The words have the potential to hit heartland America like a ton of bricks—or more accurately, a cartload of coal.
Sen. Obama’s plan to bring “hope” and “change” will inevitably hurt millions of hard-working, middle-to-lower-class Americans as he seeks to save the planet from the Great Menace of Global Warming. Of course, those hit hardest will be the coal miners in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania whom he has been trying to court during this intense election season.
But don’t be fooled by thinking they will be the only ones to pay. Implementing his carbon-punishing policies will be exorbitantly expensive for the average American—those middle- and lower-income citizens to whom he has so often promised help. And that’s true not only for what Mr. Obama’s coal plan portends, but for what it presages, as well.
Don’t believe it? Look at Sen. Obama’s pals down at the Bay Area. They’ve just instituted a ban with heavy fines on those who use a fireplace. That’s right, a wood-burning fireplace. Says the air district’s general council: “We want to protect people’s health from the health effects of wood smoke on a few very cold nights when the problem is most severe.”
So if residents are hit by winter and cannot afford their heating bills—after all, Sen. Obama wants to raise the price of gas; and coal, nuclear energy, etc. are off-limits—what are they to do? Is lighting a fire for self-preservation verboten? The irony here is that Sen. Obama is going to do his best to see that lower-income people keep their houses—as long as they don’t try to heat them!
By the time that an Obama-administration has piled on excessive regulation, restrictions, and “punitive fees,” the paltry “middle-class tax cut” so prominently hyped during the campaign suddenly won’t look so shiny after all.
This scenario, while seemingly extreme, serves as the proverbial ‘canary in a coal mine,’ warning the citizenry of the terrible policies that a Barack Obama administration—teaming up with powerful majorities in both houses of Congress—is capable of enforcing. In short, this new wave of liberalism, led by Barack Obama, is threatening to rip the hearth right out of the home.
