Henry Waxman has successfully ousted John Dingell as chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee. (We discussed this earlier, here.) He’d better hurry up and ram through as much liberty and economy-destroying “green” legislation as he can, because the AGW consensus is in tatters. Besides, what better way to set the stage for nationalization of even more of our economy than to push the economy completely over the cliff in to full-scale economic depression with ill-founded and ill-timed envirowhackery? They’ll blame it all on the “Hoover Booosh Depression” and ramrod their Green dogma into permanent control of the world energy economy just as their pseudoscientific fraud is finally disintegrating.

At this rate it’s going to be a race between the glaciers and the food riots.

HT: Ace

UPDATE: The WSJ weighs in:

That fissure [on environmental matters] neatly separates the Waxman Democrats from the old vanguard that Mr. Dingell represents. He was first elected in 1955 and has always tried to protect his hometown Detroit auto makers from the eco-mandates that ultimately helped to land them in their present predicament. Mr. Dingell’s rough-hewn candor about the realities of “doing something” about climate change also helped to make him a green pariah. He knows that carbon regulation and taxes will fall most heavily on domestic manufacturing and Midwest states that rely on coal-fired power. His sympathies lie with the people who work near (or in) factories and drive Fords or Chevys.

Mr. Waxman, speaking for the upscale precincts of Beverly Hills, wants to phase out coal and cars that use gasoline. The coastal elites who now dominate Democratic politics will happily trade the blue collar for the green collar.

We can only hope that the blue-collar workers are paying attention, and have figured out that both the Democrats and their union bosses have sold them out.

We should add that Mr. Dingell is hardly some business apologist. At Energy and Commerce in the 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. Dingell would burn the paint off the committee room walls with his interrogations of energy, insurance and drug company executives. The irony is that Democrats have found, in Mr. Waxman, an even more extreme antibusiness tribune, who will no doubt use his new powers to go after any concern that turns a profit but refuses to pay his party the obeisance of campaign cash and regulatory submission. In short, the Democrats have ousted the dean of the House for the spleen of the House.

Waxman’s career is the ultimate revenge story. He’s the ugly kid who got picked on in grade school, filled forever with hate and venom, finally in the position to obliterate his enemies. Some innocently malicious third-grade bully had no frickin’ clue what kind of monster he was spawning.

It’s obvious who now pulls the Democratic levers of power, and anyone in the energy or health-care business had better erect the barricades.

Barack Obama may have the sense to try to govern from somewhere near the center, whether out of genuine moderation, or Leftist calculation, we can’t yet know. It’s becoming quite clear that the Democratic Congress feels no such restraint. I wonder if any of the House “Blue Dogs” will decide that their survival in 2010 will be in jeopardy if they sign off on the Pelosi/Waxman atrocities that are rolling through the pipeline now.

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