Hangin’ with the Priz-nat

President Clinton spoke in Halifax on Thursday. It was pretty cool to be in the same room with him, I must confess. His delivery was excellent and his jokes were well-placed and natural. Clinton was everything you might expect of a former President and now circuit speaker of some 350 engagements per year.

His polished veneer aside, it was (and is) clear to me that Clinton remains a dedicated neo-liberal.

His entire speech was built upon the classic “it takes a village to raise a child” Hillary-ism.  From the environment to pandemics to Katrina to 911 to economics to AIDS to activism, the message was loud and clear: we are forever joined as a global community and there is no tearing us asunder. The key phrase of the day, interdependence. We can do nothing without each other; we will henceforth be constantly affecting one another; we are one big global family and it’s time we start acting like it.

On the environment the President figuratively channeled Al Gore, devoting as much as two minutes of his speech to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hysteria, specifically catastrophic sea level increases due to a 9-degree Celsius rise in global temperature and the melting of the Greenland ice cap by the end of the century, along with the death of the oceans due to man-made CO₂ emissions. Capping the fear mongering was the call to act quickly to avoid certain disaster.

Of course the methods we should employ to overcome the aforementioned “big problems” is where Clinton was conspicuously short on detail, probably because that’s where the devil lives and few be there who want to unleash him without first taking the time to convince people that he’s innocuous. The “devil” in this case being larger, farther-reaching government, which, judging by the themes of his speech, is Clinton’s vision for the future.  In fact, I remarked to my wife later in the evening that Clinton carefully sowed the seeds of world government without actually uttering the specific words — we can’t solve problems independently; we aren’t individual nations; our economies are intertwined; we cannot make progress without each other; solutions must be global in nature and reach; we will either rise or fall together, and only together.

The whole thing left me wondering if I the only person in attendance who had the slightest misgivings (“eebie-jeebies”) about what the President was saying and not saying.