Obama Trys the Big Scare Technique in Hopenchangen (Copenhagen)

The tactic doesn’t work any better on China than it does anymore in the U.S.

A rare blizzard blew into Copenhagen yesterday in advance of Obama’s arrival and his latest speech trotting out the now familiar tactic of the “big scare.” He greeted delegates with these opening lines:

OBAMA: You would not be here unless you – like me – were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science. Unchecked, climate change will pose unacceptable risks to our security, our economies, and our planet. That much we know.

Oh the sky is falling! Run for your lives! Aren’t people getting a bit tired of Obama’s habit of crying “WOLF?” Yes they are.

Whether it’s the climate hoax, the stimulus bust or health scare, Obama’s first rhetorical refuge is to try and scare us into obediance. It’s not working. We’re on to him.

All the president’s mendacity
By David Harsanyi
Denver Post
December 18, 2009

President Barack Obama grimly warned America this week that if his health care plans fail, the nation will go “bankrupt.”

Sure, adding another trillion-dollar entitlement program to our $12 trillion of debt may seem like a counterintuitive way to stave off economic ruin, but who are we to argue? The president’s got smarts.

And as is the case with so many issues, Obama adorned his rhetoric with sharp warnings of calamity should he fail, fabricated consensus to buttress his case and a promise of rapture should he succeed.

You’ll remember it was Obama who cautioned that failure to pass the stimulus boondoggle would “turn a crisis into a catastrophe.” He claimed that a failure to act on cap and trade will lead us to “irreversible catastrophe” and that a failure to pass a government-run health care system will mean “more Americans dying every day.”

It’s like living the Old Testament. Scary.

Holy burning bushes! Did you know that everyone — and I mean everyone — agrees with the president? Obama stressed this week that you can “talk to every health care economist out there and they will tell you that … whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve and starting to reduce costs for families, businesses and government, those elements are in this bill.”

Not “some” or “most” or “Peter Orszag on a two-day bender” but “every” health care economist in the entire world would tell you as much.

This sort of exaggeration reminds us of another whopper the president unloaded. While promoting the stimulus plan in January, he claimed that “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy.”

No disagreement whatsoever … until the Cato Institute found 200 economists from major universities across the country who did have a disagreement — and judging from the stimulus plan’s impressive impotence, perhaps Obama should have lent them an ear.

So when Obama says that “whatever ideas exist” to help with cost are featured in the health care bills, let’s chalk it up to his propensity to exaggerate, embellish or worse.
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Of course, ignoring the substantive ideas of the ideological opposition is not, in and of itself, new for presidents or politicians. But Obama’s fondness for creating imaginary consensus and offering false choices to the American people has been something to behold.

Meanwhile, Obama has had about as much luck in Copenhagen convincing China and India to curb their carbon emissions as he did with winning the Olympics for Chicago!