Kicking the national addiction to oil and building more roads are diametrically opposed as policy positions. But President Obama appeared giddily unaware of the contradiction when he christened the 10,000th Stimulus road-building project in Ohio today. Touching down for less than an hour in Columbus, flanked by One-Term Ted of Ohio, aka Governor Strickland, the President touted the temporary construction jobs that will come from laying more asphalt over open ground as exactly what the country needs. http://www.politicsdaily.com/...
The President said that building these roads will bring more private investment as a result -- a theory that hasn't drawn academic support since the Pleistocene, roughly. The Governor chimed in acknowledging that just building roads won't do the trick (duh), and then proceeded to chide the "private sector" and the banks for not providing enough investment and credit (yeah, that'll work).
Let's get something straight, Mr. President: If the investment capital for new development isn't there, the VERY LAST THING ON EARTH WE NEED is more petrochemicals covering fertile soil, inviting automobiles that have no place to go. That is especially true in a state like Ohio, the population of which is growing only marginally, and declining in many areas.
In short, today's Obama-Strickland event seemed designed and is guaranteed to prove that Democrats can be even more dunderheaded than Republicans, who are now campaigning in Ohio on the manifest stupidity of these "Stimulus" projects. And the Republicans, on this issue, are right.
So forgive me if I treat Barack Obama, whom I generally support, as an abject imbecile for a moment. Here are the reasons why it's wrong to build more road projects in a state like Ohio:
- New roads cover and destroy soil that supports living things, which by sprouting would otherwise help clean the air and consume CO2.
- New roads are made from asphalt, a petrochemical product.
- New roads encourage more driving, exactly the opposite of getting this country off its automotive addiction.
- New roads need to be maintained in the future, taxing local budgets and our general ability to maintain the infrastructure we already have.
- Areas like Ohio that are depopulating in absolute or relative terms need ROAD DESTRUCTION projects to lessen municipal burdens and improve the environment, NOT road construction projects.
- Contributing yet more resources to automotive transportation makes it that much more difficult to transition to mass transit or non-automotive rapid transit.
- Creating temporary construction jobs with no permanent productive development leads to a dependency on repeated temporary stimulus fixes, with no end in sight.
- Bowing to the short-sighted demands of construction unions marks the Democratic Party as a hostage to special interests.
- If your mantra is "If you build it, they will come," then you might as well plead guilty to the charge that your economic program is A FIELD OF DREAMS.
- Barack, you just totally negated everything you said a few days ago about moving this nation off its oil dependency.
In short this is dumb. It's really really profoundly stupendously galactically dumb. It's so dumb that it can't really be an Obama idea, and truth is, I don't actually blame the President. This has all the hallmarks of a Strickland initiative. Strickland roped the President into this, and it's Strickland's fault that almost all of Ohio's stimulus projects involve building senseless, stupid, destructive new roads.
Barack, your problem is that you have a nincompoop, and probably a sabateur, running the state of Ohio in the name of the Democratic Party. Next time One-Term Ted asks you to come for an event like this: DO NOT COME.
Now I am a bit bitter about this because Mr. Strickland approved a Stimulus road-building project less than a mile from my home. The $3 million project will extend an unused highway overpass into -- I kid you not -- a cornfield. It's worse than a cloverleaf to no-place. It's a cloverleaf to no-place that will destroy someplace because the area is extremely valuable archaeological land, adjacent to one of the most spectacular ancient earthworks in North America.
We are destroying our heritage along with our future, because some DINO dunderheads were raised on the idea that Democrats must support building new roads.
I believe it was General Westmoreland who said that we could pave over North Vietnam and be home by noon. We failed to accomplish that, but today, Barack Obama did his best to accomplish it in Ohio.
It's totally insane.
UPDATE: Some commenters accuse me of factual error because the particular roads in question are being "widened" and are not "new" and because other improvements are being made to the single intersection. My response:
If you think it takes $15 million to "improve" a single intersection in Columbus, and that this is a priority project for federal money that will actually lead to economic recovery, then I have a cloverleaf to no-place to sell you.
This is exactly the kind of phoney-baloney stuff that makes the GOP salivate. John Kasich will be all over this in his campaign, and why the former Lehman Brothers exec is actually trouncing Strickland with Ohio Independents.
The particular project they chose for today's event is the BEST project for this photo-op they could find. The other road projects in the state are total stinking piles of corrupt nonsense, like the one in my county, and those are the ones that most Ohioans actually see.
And let's not even talk about the history -- like the construction of Route 32, the superhighway to noplace, a pet project of Democrat pork king Vern Riffe. Ohio road projects have a history of corruption and wastefulness.
I guess you had to be here in 2008 when an ODOT district office run by Democrats was busted en masse for running a kickback caper, using the proceeds from non-performed contracts to pay for hookers and Las Vegas hotel rooms.
Denial festers, party on!