Webloggin » Tough Week for Obama

The past week wasn’t a good one for Obama. He began by killing them in their 10,000s (instead of in their 10s) in Kansas. His excuse was almost as bad as his faux pas: he was tired. As many pointed out, if a man in his mid-40s is tired a few months into the campaign, he might not be to the job of being President. He went on to lambast American cars in a speech to American car makers. One might be able to admire his tactless courage, were it not for the fact that he bolstered his speech with a huge factual misrepresentation about the nature of Japanese cars. (Toyota quickly refuted these claims.)

Thomas Lifson, at American Thinker, took the opportunity opened up by Obama’s error to look at the difference between cars in Japan and America. He points out, for example, that people drive minute cars in Japan that are calibrated to the cities’ extremely small streets and that can still be used comfortably by the “smaller than your average American” Japanese. More interestingly, though, Lifson points out that there simply aren’t old Japanese cars on the road:

One other aspect of Japan’s auto fleet versus ours bears consideration. Japan enforces a very rigorous inspection program, the dreaded shaken system, which forces vehicles off the road at an average age of around seven years, and an average mileage of roughly 70,000 miles. If your car has a dent in it, don’t even bother showing up for your shaken. Basically, if a car is not in like-new condition, it cannot be driven. As a result, one of Japan’s lesser-known big businesses is the export of used cars to Russia, New Zealand, and other lands where a lower price is appreciated and regulatory authorities see nothing wrong with a car that fails the shaken.

This means, says Lifson, that older cars, which typically are less energy efficient than newer cars, do not exist in Japan. The Japanese have skewed their gas mileage average in a way that makes it impossible to compare their energy efficiency to that in America. I won’t even give them points for having made a very costly decision in favor of clean air. To have done that, they would have had to announce that all old cars must be destroyed. Instead, they’ve simply shipped their potential pollution problem overseas.

Incidentally, while we may see it as a bad week for Obama, NPR rather conspicuously avoided including him in their weekend round-up of quotable quotes. The opening moment is George Bush’s true gaffe, when he misspoke “1976″ as “1776″ in alluding to a trip the Queen had earlier made to America. It was a funny mistake, and the Queen responded graciously and amusingly in a later speech. Since NPR opened with a “newsworthy” gaffe, I would have assumed that Obama would be included in that round-up, but he wasn’t. Maybe he wasn’t funny enough, or maybe he isn’t important enough, or maybe NPR didn’t want to give people another opportunity to say about Obama what Mr. Bookworm said when he heard President Bush’s misspeak on the NPR roundup: “He’s such an idiot.”

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