Obamunist Triangulation

Or "How Max Baucus became the good cop of the Far Left":

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus said today that he has “serious reservations” about a major global warming bill and warned fellow Democrats to water down the measure in hopes of getting it through the Senate.

Speaking at the start of an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing where he is the second highest-ranking member, the Montana Democrat said he wanted to weaken the bill’s 2020 target for greenhouse gas emissions — now 20% below 2005 levels. He did not name a specific midterm target for the heat-trapping gases, instead telling reporters he hoped for “some modification.” …

Baucus chaired the environment committee from 1993 until 1995, and his centrist voice carries tremendous weight in the party’s leadership ranks. But Democrats also have a 12-7 majority on the EPW Committee, and his vote likely won’t be necessary as Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) looks to move the bill in the coming weeks.

Instead, Boxer and Democrats face the critical question of whether they should wait to deal with Baucus later in the negotiations, as his concerns foreshadow a tough fight to win the sixty votes needed to pass a comprehensive bill.

It won't be a tough fight, it will be an impossible one.  The "screw middle America" approach to cripple & tax (h/t Big Lizard) of Waxman (California)-Markey (Massachusetts) in the House version and Boxer (California)-Kerry (Massachusetts - noticing a pattern here?) in the Senate - which is a little like your arms and legs joining forces to disembowel your torso while your head is forced to watch - will see to that.

But it bears remembering how Baucus's vaunted "centrism" played out in the BarryCare fight on the Senate side.  His purported attempt to put together a "moderate" "bipartisan" alternative with three GOP members of the Finance Committee was torn apart and disrupted by the Far Left's tidal pull and ended up being the skeleton for a ton of additional the statist "meat" that Baucus had supposedly been trying to sidestep as being (ahem) unpassable.  There's no particularly compelling reason to believe that the Montana senator's "influence" would not follow a similar path with Boxer-Kerry:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT, 80%) — who just recently wrote his own Obamacare bill in the Senate Finance Committee, which he chairs — has decided to write his own energy bill as well; he came out swinging against the Boxer bill… but his objections are all to the specifics; Baucus has no problem with the basic concept of the Obama-Boxer bill:

1. Regulate carbon emissions as if they were pollutants (so stop exhaling, you climate traitor!)
2. Force industries, farms, utilities, and other businesses to buy “carbon credits” that allow them to pollute the planet — i.e., feed the plants.

3. Set a national carbon reduction goal of about 80% by 2050 (!). This is so draconian, it can only be achieved one of two ways: By absolutely crippling American industry to the point where we’d have trouble competing with Albania; or by embarking upon a massive program to build a hundred or more nuclear power plants.

   The Democrats have no interest in building a hundred nuclear power plants. Or even one.

4. “Fine” businesses and utilities increasingly staggering amounts of money when they’re unable to meet that absurdist goal… thus creating the most massive tax the United States has ever levied — on the evil, unAmerican sin of producing energy.

And lest you think this is hyperbole, Babsy is quite open about her economically genocidal aspirations - including how it ought to attract Baucus's support:

Mrs. Boxer said that Mr. Baucus told her Friday that he could not back the bill in its current form. Still, she expressed hope that recent declines in U.S. emission levels caused by the economic recession of as much as 8% since 2005 would make the 2020 target more palatable for Mr. Baucus and other bill critics.

"In other words, we’ll already be so impoverished by the recession, which Barack H. Obama now 'owns' via his counter-economic policies that perpetuate it, that we’ll hardly even notice when we become even poorer due to his equally risible energy policy," Dafyd writes.  But it's more even than that, as it reveals yet again the true purpose of the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb that produced the Panic of 2008: the downpayment on the Left's final, once and for all destruction of the American Republic as it has existed since 1789.  Cripple & Tax, BarryCare, Hogzilla, they're not just blind ideological insanity, but the deliberate, planned destruction of the American economy, American power, and the American way of life.

Which, of course, is why Boxer-Kerry is already deader than poor Kelsey's nuts.  And why Max Baucus will be (the Dems hope) so useful in crafting a "moderate/bipartisan" alternative to economic suicide that merely bleeds us to death with a thousand and one energy leeches instead of making us swallow a live daisy-cutter instead.