FALLING PANDA: Four Reasons To Be Thankful

I wasn’t blogging over the holiday weekend. I was eating. I assumed that you were doing the same thing so I saved my annual list of things we have to be thankful for until today.

This year, all Americans find themselves in a nervous state regarding the economy and if you’re a conservative, about the coming changes which are sure to follow President-Elect Obama’s inauguration.

However, recent events should ease our minds a bit and lead us to be grateful for our good luck and to be optimistic about our future in this ever-resilient nation of ours. So here is a partial list containing some things to be happy about in these tumultuous times.

1.Obama’s Apparent Pragmatism

Last week the President-Elect made two decisions which should give us all great confidence that he intends to put common sense over ideology. The first was his decision to keep Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates at the Pentagon. This signals that, despite his constantly evolving campaign message of failure in Iraq, Obama has finally come to terms with the fact that our recent efforts in the region have been successful and that defeat is not an option.

At around the same time as the Gates news was being floated, another balloon was released suggesting that Obama’s plan to hike taxes would be put on hold until the economic crisis was over.

Again, it would appear that, once out of campaign mode, Obama has wisely admitted what Republicans have always known: raising taxes is bad for the economy. Especially in the short term. Especially when you’re in a recession. Especially when there is so much uncertainty regarding the financial markets.

These two moves should instill great hope among those who didn’t vote for Obama that he is more pragmatic and less radical than we once thought.

It should also send a clear message to liberals that even though Obama ran against the Bush Administration, your great savior is not going to overturn two of his predecessor’s biggest policy initiatives. If he’s smart, he won’t touch the Patriot Act either.

2.We didn’t Elect/Re-Elect John Kerry

Throughout the course of this campaign, Democrats liked to hype this election as the most important in out lifetime. Four years ago Republicans dubbed 2004 with the same title. Despite which one you think was more important, everyone should be happy about the fact that John Kerry was not running for re-election this year.

Had Kerry prevailed in ’04 many events would have unfolded in the same way as they have under President Bush. New Orleans would still be under water and the financial crisis would have gone down the same way.

The difference would have been that when the situation in Iraq got really bad in 2005-06, Kerry would have packed it in. This move would have once again saddled America with the label of a weak-willed nation which doesn’t stand up to its enemies when the going gets tough. Al-Queda would then have free-rein over the world, knowing that if they shed enough blood, America would inevitably back off.

The Democrats who love Obama can be grateful that Kerry lost as well, since had he won, Obama would have at least had to wait until 2012 to run for the White House. Had Kerry lost in ’08, a likely outcome given the economic situation, Obama would have had to face an incumbent GOP president. That’s much more difficult than running against an unpopular lame duck.

3.Gay Marriage Protests

In the wake of the financial crisis and the weakening economy, our enemies and even some of our citizens have jumped at the chance to label the American experiment a failure. Some folks are saying that capitalism has failed, even as shoppers are trampled by plasma TV craving consumers at Wal-Mart.

Of course, anyone with a sense of history realizes that reports of America’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Nowhere is this more evident than in the left’s reaction to the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in that state.

The reaction among many people, especially the young folks who thought it was so important that they elect anti-gay marriage candidate Obama, was to go out and protest, and to shoot petitions around Facebook. This reaction should show us that we Americans are not so troubled by dwindling 401k’s or terror, that we don’t have time to debate relatively trivial matters such as who gets to call themselves “married” and who does not.

While many Americans shake their fist in outrage at “greedy” CEO’s and repeatedly remind us of how much the rest of the world hates us, deep down they must know that everything is going to turn out all right. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be so riled up about this.

Now before you call for my head or say that I'm full of H8(which is an oversimplification and a cop-out, I might add), ask yourself this: if unmemployment was 25% and the Mumbai attacks had happened in Chicago, would anyone's immediate concerns dwell on gay nuptuals? I think not.

4.The State Of The Planet

Finally, there’s some good news about Global Warming. IT DOESN’T EXSIST! Seriously though, new findings by NASA and a statistics firm called Hadley-data recently released a report which stated the following:

- In every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased

-There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.

Now, I have never jumped on the Global Warming bandwagon, but there’s really no bandwagon to jump on unless you completely accept the Al Gore vision of environmental apocalypse.

Hopefully, the election of Barack Obama will signify an end to the knee-jerk alarmism, which has come to define the left during the Bush years. That same alarmist sentiment that gave us such liberal favorites, as “We’re becoming a fascist state!” and “Our civil liberties are disappearing!”

What is needed is vigorous debate and a thorough fact-check before our nation starts throwing money at a problem that may or may not actually be a problem.

-Dan Joseph