Clueless and Gullible

Those are two character traits that I, and indeed most Americans, would not want in a President of the United States. So why do so many Americans think that Sen. Barack Obama is the right choice?

Let's take his comments yesterday about China. Here's the video:


Here's the transcript:

Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”

It's blatantly obvious that Obama doesn't know what he's talking about. Had he or his 300 advisers been paying attention to the news over just the past year, he would have seen the following:

1. Multiple product recalls because of lead or other poisons present in products sold to the US, including toys, toothpaste, and pet food;
   
2. Tainted medication produced in China killed dozens of Panamanians;
3. The Chinese government had desperately tried to clear the air in Beijing ahead of the Olympics by closing thousands of factories and power plants that belch all manner of pollutants into the sky. It didn't entirely work - as the haze remained well into the Olympic games. The problem is not that the Chinese were able to clear the air, but that they wont be able to keep those factories and power plants offline indefinitely. They will be restarted, and the pollution will keep on coming indefinitely.
   
4. Blatant and open disregard for environmental disasters - the Songhua River disaster resulted in killing the Songhua River after a benzene spill. Millions were forced to find potable water elsewhere - a hard thing to do in China because so many water sources are poisoned and incapable of being used for drinking; and
5. The Sichuan earthquake showed that the Chinese displayed a blatant disregard for the construction of thousands of buildings constructed in the past several decades in an earthquake prone area. Hundreds of schools became tombs because the government cut corners and built with inferior rebar and as a result tens of thousands of children were killed; and scavengers are now selling that same inferior rebar recovered from destroyed buildings so that the disaster will be replayed down the road.
   

Obama has clearly bought into the facade installed by the Chinese. It's a Potemkin vision of China, that bears little resemblance to reality. The sad reality is the hundreds of millions of Chinese live in squalor. They lack potable water, electricity and proper sanitation. The Chinese government built plenty of gleaming skyscrapers in Beijing and beautiful looking sports arenas to support the Beijing Olympics, but it was done by removing hundreds of thousands of Chinese people from their homes, or cordoning off entire villages from view of the cameras.

The Chinese construction efforts are indeed on a massive scale, but consider how those new buildings will be powered. They are not powered by banks of new wind power generators or solar collectors, but rather hundreds of coal fired power plants.

China has a superior work environment that businesses might consider working in because of cheap labor and lax environmental laws. Those two areas should be blatantly obvious, but would undermine Obama's very argument that China has overtaken the US.

The very fact that Obama thinks that the US should emulate the Chinese efforts should give pause for concern because of the draconian measures taken by the Chinese government to get to this point.

And don't get me started on China's iron fisted control of the Internet - a key piece of infrastructure. They crush dissent on the Internet and regularly engage in censorship and crackdowns. The government still refuses to allow the Chinese people to memorialize the Chinese Communist crackdown against democracy protesters in Tienanmen Square - going so far as to limit Internet access to news of the crackdown that occurred in 1989.