Kimberly Strassel comments in the WSJ on the EPA dust-up we discussed the other day, first quoting the global warming skeptic’s boss at the agency telling him to sit down and shut up in his dissent on cap and trade:

“The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision…I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office…With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”…

the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both “the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded.” In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin’s study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.

Perhaps we should just take the advice of Paul Krugman and stop being “deniers” and “traitors” — or perhaps implement this from Tom Friedman: “A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic…It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.” What impels these men to such righteous fervor, and to such apparent hysteria at dissent?

Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the WSJ comments on the arrest of the Honduran President at the order of that country’s Supreme Court, an event called a “coup” by many in the media and politics, including Barack Obama and the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba:

Hugo Chávez’s coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation’s constitution. It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

It should be noted that President Obama, who had little to say in the early days of Iran’s turmoils (and much of that was inappropriate), found his voice immediately in this case.

Reuters: “Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a ‘terrible precedent’ of transition by military force unless it was reversed. ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,’ Obama told reporters.”

Obama’s initial gut reactions to the authoritarians and democrats of the world have become as predictible as they are disturbing.

The NYT has a story on Honduras that makes for an odd read:

Mr. Zelaya, 56, a rancher who often appears in cowboy boots and a western hat, has the support of labor unions and the poor. But he is a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and the middle class and the wealthy business community fear he wants to introduce Mr. Chávez’s brand of socialist populism into the country, one of Latin America’s poorest. His term was to end in January.

The Honduran military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the country’s Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”

Mr. Zelaya’s ouster capped a showdown with other branches of government over his efforts to lift presidential term limits in a referendum that was to have taken place Sunday. Critics said the vote was part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the Constitution’s limit of a single four-year term for the president.

Early this month, the Supreme Court declared the referendum unconstitutional, and Congress followed suit last week. In the last few weeks, supporters and opponents of the president have held competing demonstrations. The prosecutor’s office and the electoral tribunal issued orders for the referendum ballots to be confiscated, but on Thursday, Mr. Zelaya led a group of protesters to an air force base and seized the ballots.

When the army refused to help organize the vote, he fired the armed forces commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez. The Supreme Court ruled the firing illegal and reinstated General Vásquez.

Even the NYT kind of makes it clear which side the US should be on.

IBD carries a piece called Banana Democrats:

During his campaign, President Obama made a big deal of criticizing leaders who are elected democratically but don’t govern democratically. He’s had a chance to show that it mattered in Honduras. He didn’t…

That’s the sorry story as Honduras’ now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a “survey” to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It’s the same blueprint for a rigged political system that’s made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries.

Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.

As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”

President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.

There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).

Yet the U.S. administration stood with Chavez and Castro, calling Zelaya’s lawful removal “a coup.” Obama called the action a “terrible precedent,” and said Zelaya remains president.

Once again it seems clear enough which side the US should be taking.

John Fund has a piece called “The Law Triumphs in Honduras” in the WSJ:

foreign observers are condemning the ouster of Honduran President Mel Zelaya, a supporter of Hugo Chavez, as a “military coup.” But can it be a coup when the Honduran military acted on the orders of the nation’s Supreme Court, the step was backed by the nation’s attorney general, and the man replacing Mr. Zelaya and elected in emergency session by that nation’s Congress is a member of the former president’s own political party?

Mr. Zelaya had sacked General Romeo Vasquez, head of the country’s armed forces, after he refused to use his troops to provide logistical support for a referendum designed to let Mr. Zelaya escape the country’s one-term limit on presidents. Both the referendum and the firing of the military chief have been declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Mr. Zelaya intended yesterday to use ballots printed in Venezuela to conduct the vote anyway.

All this will be familiar to members of Honduras’ legislature, who vividly recall how Mr. Chavez in Venezuela adopted similar means to hijack his country’s democracy and economy.

Seems clear enough to us which side the US should be on.

Paul Krugman comments on cap and trade and finds “treason” among the global warming “deniers”:

the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course…

researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today…

Gosh! Other government reports, suppressed by the government, draw very different conclusions. And it certainly seems that global cooling has been going on for some time, likely as a result of solar activity. For the record, we’re skeptical of AGM because an increase of 100ppm in CO2 causing such catastrophic problems just doesn’t pass the test of common sense, in our opinion. Indeed, it has been argued that increases in CO2 are an effect of rising temperatures, not the cause. We could be wrong of course, but Krugman’s rather hysterical tone doesn’t help the hypothesis he’s trying to sell.

Cap and trade: a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist?

Bloomberg:

The ICE’s Dollar Index fell below 80 on the call from China for an alternative to the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency. The gauge tracking the greenback versus the currencies of six leading trading partners decreased 0.5 percent to 79.90.

“To prevent the deficiencies in the main reserve currency, there’s a need to create a new currency that’s delinked from the economies of the issuers,” the People’s Bank of China, or PBOC, said. China is the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $763.5 billion in April.

China sees clearly what is happening in America. Pity that there is apparently no national mood for adult supervision in the US government at the moment.

A draft report from the National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) of the US Environmental Protection Agency:

The EPA’s management’s response to the report:

Environmentalism is a religion of sorts, and an unreformed religion at that. (Those sorts of believers are capable of endless trouble, as we all know.) Chief among its sins is man-made global warming — allegedly caused by CO2’s teeny-tiny increase — for which America must be punished. No matter that China and India are the major contributors to increases at this point. In the Obama administration, Gaia must be served and dissent is clearly not welcome. HT: Powerline

We understand that all administrations want to speak with a coherent voice, and controlling the bureaucracies is one element of that, but any bill that is (a) a “huge tax” according to Warren Buffett; (b) paradoxically also a “jobs bill” according to Obama; and (c) something that is needed to “save our planet” in Obama’s words deserves full and open debate — not evidence of the crass suppression of opposing views.

You can’t look at the chart above without thinking that America has lost its mind. The intergenerational theft from our children and grandchildren is evidence of insanity or idiocy. James Lewis in The American Thinker makes some points that have appeared here as well:

As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean?…

The Federal EPA is about to officially declare carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. That’s not just false and unscientific; it’s not just an excuse for taxing everything in sight, including breathing. It’s not merely wrong. It’s idiotic. It marks a low point in our national conversation. Scientists or engineers with a grain of sense shouldn’t be taking the EPA seriously for a second. Forget the “climate experts,” with their grossly inadequate computer models…

Or look at Obama’s unbelievable spending spree. No sane and sensible taxpayer could possibly believe that spending trillions and trillions of dollars on blue-sky fantasies makes any sense at all; the only reason Americans aren’t in open rebellion yet is that half of them can’t believe it’s happening, and the other half are idiots. We haven’t seen the effect (yet) on our pocketbooks…

Or look at the global warming farce, still hotly pursued by the political classes in Europe and this country, although the Australians seem to be coming to their senses. China now has more millionaires than the UK, because they use all their resources, like coal, to fire their industrial plants. They will never sacrifice a single luxury car to the cap and trade fraud. Neither will India. China and India have been under the thumb of egomaniacal socialists (in the case of India) and communists (in the case of China). They’ve been there, done that, seen the suffering…

No wonder those Chinese college students fell all over themselves with laughter when Timothy Geithner assured them that Obama would never spend the United States into debt. What an idiot! They laughed because Geithner’s stupidity or mendacity was too obvious for words…

Obama’s power-grab over the medical sector of the economy? It’s profoundly stupid…Even if we already have two national lemons in our garage, Medicare and Medicaid, which nobody likes. Now Obee is trying to sell us on a really, really expensive dream mobile that will fix our problems forever, plus it’ll be cheaper than what we have now!

On the last point, health care, it is very hard to believe that Americans are that stupid or gullible. There are fewer than 800,000 doctors in the US. The Obama plan intends to provide insurance to 47 million additional people. So there is a 15% increase in potential demand from physicians, and a 0% increase in supply. Whether you support Obama or not, increasing demand while supply remains constant raises prices, the opposite of what Obama claims. It’s just not possible to do what he says he wants — price control regimes always result in rationing, lower quality, and black markets — but no one seems to care (at least so far).

Here’s the thing, perhaps: The young are disconnected from the past, and live in a world of digital utopian images. They don’t remember a hard past. So they are in the process of creating a hard future. This seems to us one of the greatest avoidable tragedies in history. Sigh.

China once again called for a new reserve currency other than the dollar, as it did first in March. China won’t pay the bill for America’s current idiocy or insanity. Who is going to pay for Obama’s party? The rich can’t. What will it take to end this madness?

More on the folly that is called cap and trade from Bloomberg:

America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, which ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance.

“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest U.S. refining capacity.

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported…One in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020 as the cost of carbon allowances erases profits, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group known as API. Carbon permits would add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline

So what? Who cares anymore in the ridiculous TV show that is called America? Who cares if cap and trade won’t even address any real problems, and creates incentives that are precisely the opposite of its stated goals? Don’t bother us. We’re America and we’re sleeping.

Iraq is planning to increase oil production substantially, just as Saudi Arabia has been doing. WSJ:

Iraq…intends to auction off oil contracts to foreign companies for the first time since Iraq nationalized its oil industry more than three decades ago…Some 120 companies expressed interest in bidding for the contracts at the June 29 and 30 auction, according to the oil ministry. Thirty-five companies qualified to bid, including Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Italy’s Eni SpA, Russia’s Lukoil and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec. The six oil fields at stake are believed to hold reserves of more than 43 billion barrels…

Just over 20 of Iraq’s roughly 80 known oil fields have been fully or partially developed, and most of its production comes from just three giants, North and South Rumaila and Kirkuk. Because lots of the black gold is considered relatively easy to extract, oil experts estimate that exploration and development in Iraq costs $1.50 to $2.25 a barrel, compared with about $5 in Malaysia or $20 in Canada…

Iraq is thought to have one of the world’s largest supplies of crude oil, with 115 billion barrels in proven reserves. But foreign know-how is key to its plans to boost oil output to 4 million barrels a day within four to five years, from 2.4 million barrels currently.

It is gross negligence on the part of the American political establishment for the country to be up to 70% dependent on imports of this strategic material. And the tiny SPR is but a drop in the bucket. But no matter. The US is in fantasyland for the moment. One day that will end, and in all likelhood it will not end well.

Although there are 1,300 competing providers of health insurance, the Obama administration says that there needs to be a government funded, single payer option. But does health care need radical restructuring at all? George Will says no and provides some facts:

Although 70 percent of insured Americans rate their health care arrangements good or excellent, radical reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is, however, a “snapshot” of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year. Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the people in the photos would be different.

Almost 39 percent of the uninsured are in five states — Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, all of which are entry points for immigrants. About 21 percent — 9.7 million — of the uninsured are not citizens. Up to 14 million are eligible for existing government programs — Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, veterans’ benefits, etc. — but have not enrolled. And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000 and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million.

Insuring the perhaps 20 million persons who are protractedly uninsured because they cannot afford insurance is conceptually simple: Give them money — (refundable) tax credits or debit cards (which have replaced food stamps) loaded with a particular value. This would produce people who are more empowered than dependent. Unfortunately, advocates of a government option consider that a defect.

The fact that the New York Times felt it necessary to cook the books in its recent poll about health care suggests that the fervor on this issue is synthetic.

The NYT had some conflicting findings in its poll:

77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care…72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65…the survey results depict a nation desperate for change

77% of those polled are pretty satisfied with the quality of their own care. Why is that an indicator of “a nation desperate for change”? But that’s not the real problem with this poll of 895 adults. Here’s the problem, as it often is in NYT polls: the sample is skewed left:

What do you make of a poll of people who voted Obama 2 to 1 over McCain? The New York Times continues to embarrass itself daily, and shows no respect whatsoever to its readers when it prints rubbish like this.

VDH sums up the rather narcissistic and strange journey that President Obama has put America on for the past six months:

in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe. He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature. By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country…

almost all Obama’s historical references were wrong or distorted: Berlin airlift, death camps, Inquisition, Muslim contribution to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, Muslim discoveries of breakthroughs in science, math, printing, etc., suggesting that as a postmodernist he (and/or his speechwriters) does not really believe in absolute truth, but rather relative competing narratives predicated on race/class/gender. And the means of magnifying the accomplishments of those “without power” justifies the ends of diminishing those “with power.” The list of other inaccuracies in his Cairo speech could be expanded from the contemporary Middle East to his references to John Adams and Islam…

Here at home — We know the boilerplate: The President outlines the problem, punctuated with those awful “them” and “they” and “some” and “others” who as extremists stand in the way of all good things and present “false choices”, but remain unnamed. (Sort of like the tropes in 1984)…These are the prefaces to his reluctance to … (fill in the blanks: run the private sector, spend massive amounts of money, take over health care, raise taxes, etc.).

Then he pauses, takes a deep breath, and in fact outlines ways to take over GM, regulate compensation, run up massive deficits, nationalize health care, and plan record tax hikes…he finishes with variations on the old campaign formula “this is the moment”, “hope and change”, “yes, we can”, “we will not be deterred.” No one can quite believe that one has just heard Obama deny that he’s going to do exactly what he then outlines he is going to do.

Obama himself gave us ample warning of his reckless grandiosity during the 2008 campaign. So we can’t say we weren’t warned. The situation has only gotten worse in the months since his inauguration. And there’s 3.5 years to go. Help!

Obama talks tough, at long last, in his Saturday radio address. But it’s not about the poor people being killed or beaten senseless in Iran, as in this graphic scene — it’s about credit card companies. AP:

this crisis may have started on Wall Street. But its impacts have been felt by ordinary Americans who rely on credit cards, home loans and other financial instruments…Those ridiculous contracts — pages of fine print that no one can figure out — will be a thing of the past. You’ll be able to compare products, with descriptions in plain language, to see what is best for you…

I welcome a debate about how we can make sure our regulations work for businesses and consumers…what I will not accept — what I will vigorously oppose — are those who do not argue in good faith…While I’m not spoiling for a fight, I’m ready for one

Obama can talk tough when he wants to. Pity he hasn’t anything much to say about democracy or human rights in the signal case of Iran, or elsewhere, for that matter, over the last six months.

The most interesting aspect of Obama’s muted response to Iran is that it is a truly revelatory moment. After all, as Roger Simon notes, Iran is an issue that, at the moment at least, “clearly unites the left and right emotionally.” The easiest choice for a politician would be to go with popular opinion; but Obama does not. Therefore, there is either deep strategy at work, or some deeply held belief. We would hope for strategy, but that’s not what we think is really going on.

China continues to ratchet up the pressure — step by step — on the Obama administration’s foolish borrowing plans. AFP:

A decision by China to reduce its US Treasury holdings suggests concern about the US attitude towards its economic woes, Chinese economists were quoted as saying in state media Wednesday…”China is implying to the US, more or less, that it should adopt a more pragmatic and responsible attitude to maintain the stability of the dollar,” He Maochun, a political scientist at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times…Beijing owned 763.5 billion dollars in US securities in April, down from 767.9 billion dollars in March.

China — you know, the country where they laugh out loud at our Secretary of the Treasury’s assurances that their investments are safe.

WSJ: “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday consumers need to stop using certain Zicam cold and allergy products because they can cause permanent loss of smell.” The letter to the maker of the product is here.

Though the company insists its products are safe and do not cause anosmia, that is not true. Though Zicam works great on colds, it also kills the sense of smell. We have recovered a little from this terrible side-effect of Zicam, and now can report, nearly some two years after losing our sense of smell, that one food has recovered its original taste: barbeque. One unfortunate aspect of losing one’s sense of smell and taste is that it is impossible to recall in any meaningful way just what different foods tasted like. Caveat emptor.

According to Drudge on June 24:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House. The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

This can’t be the same ABC that allegedly blocked the potentially very profitable sale of the Path to 9-11 DVD because it was politically inconvenient, can it?

The WSJ discusses the current resuscitation of the concept of “pay as you go” and finds that it has heard this all before:

Some things in politics you can’t make up, such as President Obama’s re-re-endorsement Tuesday of “pay-as-you-go” budgeting. Coming after $787 billion in nonstimulating stimulus, a $410 billion omnibus to wrap up fiscal 2009, a $3.5 trillion 2010 budget proposal, sundry bailouts and a 13-figure health-care spending expansion still to come, this latest vow of fiscal chastity is like Donald Trump denouncing self-promotion. Check that. Even The Donald would find this one too much to sell.

But Mr. Obama must think the press and public are dumb enough to buy it, because there he was Tuesday re-selling the same “paygo” promises that Democrats roll out every election. Paygo is “very simple,” the President claimed. “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.”

That’s what Democrats also promised in 2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that “the first thing” House Democrats would do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that “Republicans had let lapse.” By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12 times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP, spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.

Pay as you go? There’s been no payment so far for this tragedy. But the bill will very likely be coming due shortly, and perhaps we’ll discover that even many Democrats object to having their pockets picked by the dissembling elites in Washington.

Tom Bevan observes that President Obama’s calculated tactical and rhetorical devices are getting a little tiresome, as even the NYT has noticed. Bevan sees potential peril for Obama ahead in his personalizing so much of a grand and sweeping agenda that seems further and further to depart from reality:

Obama’s speeches are often strikingly self referential. Clearly, Obama sees unique background and his life experiences as an asset and a rhetorical tool, which helps explain why his recent speech in Cairo was peppered with 68 first person references (I, me, my, or mine). But the habit carries over to other speeches as well, leaving the impression that Obama is often interested in talking about Obama.

In his speech honoring the 65th Anniversary of D-Day, for example, Obama made 10 first person references. While not a huge number in itself, it was eight more than Gordon Brown made and nine more than Stephen Harper made in their respective speeches that day. In his aforementioned national security speech on May 21, President Obama made an astounding 147 first person references.

Most importantly of all, however, Obama’s high profile speechmaking on a range of big issues from restructuring GM to solving Middle East peace has dramatically increased the pressure on him to deliver results.

There is no doubt that Obama has bitten off far more than he can chew, and has doubled down by personalizing so many initiatives. The Cairo speech was noteworthy not only because Obama appeared in it 68 times, but also because at 30 points in the speech, he told other people and nations what they “must” do.

Obama’s line in the Cairo speech that no single nation should decide who should have nuclear weapons was widely taken as a rebuke to American power. However, there is another reading of this which is consistent with Obama’s constant first-person references and his personal ability to tell his listeners what they “must” and must not do. America shouldn’t tell other nations what they must do, but Mr. Obama thinks it is just fine for him to personally do so. Newsweek may have gotten it about right.

You will recall President Obama’s speech as ASU, where he derided traditional American aspirations of getting ahead in life, even as he ticked off, one by one, his own achievement of each of those goals. Hmmm. Let’s see. Aloof, charismatic, obsessed with power, “absolutely certain” that he has a special personal destiny. This can’t end well. No, this can’t end well at all.