Legacy Shots: There are War Presidents and There are Energy Presidents

You pick your battles, don’t you?

Although it’s not getting the attention it should here in the U.S.A., Merkel’s decision to completely phase out nuclear power in Germany is not just stunning but, in a picture, worth thousands of shots of Obama endlessly unwinding American wars, or giving speeches in front of corporate demonstration solar farms.

The better comparison with the Merkel photo, though, might be Obama standing in front of high tech GE generators (with American flags conveniently draped behind them) destined for Middle East sheikhs while his replacement for Paul Volker and the Economic Recovery Board, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt (head of the replacement “Jobs and Competitiveness Council”) quietly sends a thousand engineers to Japan to attempt to deal with the bleeding GE reactors at Fukushima.

…So you know the comparison is not so random, by the way, here’s what Obama was doing about the time the news from Germany was circulating.

(photo 1: Guido Bergmann, Pool – AP Photo/Bundesregierung. caption: Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel sits in a helicopter as she flies over a wind farm on the Baltic sea, near Zingst, Germany, Monday, May 2, 2011. photo 2: Ssg. Lorie Jewell/U.S. Army, via AP caption: Senator Barack Obama with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq, in a helicopter above Baghdad.)