Gingrich: Treason on Principle or just Gross Ignorance?
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While Tuesday's headlines were awash in the Imus racism flap (more on that in a minute,) a far more ominous story flitted beneath the radar entirely: Today (Tuesday Apr 10) Newt Gingrich, erstwhile star of the conservatives, rolled out a contemptible betrayal of principle in a D.C. debate against John Kerry on "global warming".
Gingrich, a man who for years has posed as one of the voices of core GOP principles, apparently knows as little about said principles as he does about basic debating strategy or about Martin Durkin's evisceration of the Gore eco-sermon. Right out of the chute he concedes the false premises of the anti-capitalist movement: Human activity is (somehow) causing "global warming"; government can mitigate the impending doom by using brute force to compel people to sacrifice themselves to the new god; and there is nothing ethically wrong with this picture. This is of course great news for arch-leftist Kerry, for winning a debate, even when your own argument is nonexistent, becomes child's play if your opponent signs onto all of your core points without a peep of dissent. Witness this exchange:
I suppose we can thank Mr. Gingrich for clearing up any lingering doubts as to his grasp of principle in defense of Western Civilization, and for decrementing the 2008 GOP's likely Presidential candidate field by a factor of one.
While Kerry maintains the standard Democrat-Socialist Party line, Gingrich goes on to elaborate on his "differing view" (contradicting his own "Urgently" contention): Instead of destroying industrial civilization via an immediate putsch, he says, what's needed is the more gradual tightening of a noose with yet more technocratic manipulation of the economy.
One would be hard-pressed to come up with a fictional encapsulation of the mechanism by which evil ideas triumph that was more dead-on accurate than this. Bravo, Mr. Gingrich! It's a perfect, textbook example of everything the GOP's "leadership" has been doing dead wrong since roughly November 1994. Gingrich needs to hear from us, now.
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
- On other anti-industrialism fronts, Dr. William Gray, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, slammed Al Gore as "a gross alarmist" who "doesn't know what he's talking about" in an AP interview Saturday the 7th. Note: The AP story is interesting in its bias, in that its author Cain Burdeau makes several veiled insinuations that Gray is an old, dotty crank, by way of an ad hominem. As the great percussionist and lyricist Neil Peart put it, "You can twist perceptions / Reality won't budge";
- It turns out that the famous "poor helpless stranded polar bears" photo that "global warming" cultists splattered on the front pages of major newspapers like the New York Daily Socialist Worker...ermm..Times, London's "Times" and "Daily Mail," the international "Herald Tribune" and Canada's "Ottowa Citizen," as well as being referenced, infamously, by Herr Gore himself as heart-rending evidence of "global warming's" destructive effects, was...yet another fraud perpetrated by the "global warming scary story" crowd. The photo, depicting cute, cuddly polar bears supposedly stranded on a dwindling ice floe miles from shore due to "global warming":
...was in fact taken two and a half years earlier by an Australian marine biology student on a field trip - in the dead of August, when ice floes...typically melt.
D'OH!
- Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at M.I.T. - and one of those featured in The Great Global Warming Swindle - has gotten an excellent article published in the April 16 issue of Newsweek International. Conspicuous is the fact that the American edition of Newsweek for some odd reason hasn't seen fit to publish the same article... At any rate, Lindzen's article "Why So Gloomy?" is an excellent recap of several of the slam-dunk points made in "Swindle," along with a number of equally persuasive points (to a mind open to reason,) such as the nonexistence of an "optimal temperature" toward which to strive (if indeed human activity could change anything in either direction,) and the fact that global warming, if it were to occur, would be of vast benefit, not detriment, to virtually all life on Earth - a point touched on by Pepperdine economist George Reisman in his landmark 1990 essay The Toxicity of Environmentalism;
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Finally, though I'm loath to cover trivia generally falling within the province of tabloids, there was...the racism flap involving talk radio host Don Imus.
Yeah, his comments were mindless, offensive in the extreme against people having nothing to do with politics, and yeah, the man has clearly got some problems with race, and clearly he's an idiot. 'Part of a large club on that last, I think. But am I the only one getting the irony of...racists Jessie "Hymietown" Jackson and Alfred Brawley-Sharpton posing as his moral judges? "Birds of a feather," indeed.
You know, I think they all deserve each other. I say we deposit the three of them on a small island somewhere, so they can live out their days frothing at each other about the comparative wavelengths of light reflected by their pigmentation. "As important as your shoe size," indeed.
Next...
While Tuesday's headlines were awash in the Imus racism flap (more on that in a minute,) a far more ominous story flitted beneath the radar entirely: Today (Tuesday Apr 10) Newt Gingrich, erstwhile star of the conservatives, rolled out a contemptible betrayal of principle in a D.C. debate against John Kerry on "global warming".
Gingrich, a man who for years has posed as one of the voices of core GOP principles, apparently knows as little about said principles as he does about basic debating strategy or about Martin Durkin's evisceration of the Gore eco-sermon. Right out of the chute he concedes the false premises of the anti-capitalist movement: Human activity is (somehow) causing "global warming"; government can mitigate the impending doom by using brute force to compel people to sacrifice themselves to the new god; and there is nothing ethically wrong with this picture. This is of course great news for arch-leftist Kerry, for winning a debate, even when your own argument is nonexistent, becomes child's play if your opponent signs onto all of your core points without a peep of dissent. Witness this exchange:
"'What would you say to Sen. Inhofe and others in the Senate who are resisting even science?[sic] What's your message to them here today?' Kerry asked.
'My message, I think is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading in the atmosphere —'
'And do it urgently, now?' Kerry interrupted.
'Urgently, yes,' Gingrich said."
I suppose we can thank Mr. Gingrich for clearing up any lingering doubts as to his grasp of principle in defense of Western Civilization, and for decrementing the 2008 GOP's likely Presidential candidate field by a factor of one.
While Kerry maintains the standard Democrat-Socialist Party line, Gingrich goes on to elaborate on his "differing view" (contradicting his own "Urgently" contention): Instead of destroying industrial civilization via an immediate putsch, he says, what's needed is the more gradual tightening of a noose with yet more technocratic manipulation of the economy.
One would be hard-pressed to come up with a fictional encapsulation of the mechanism by which evil ideas triumph that was more dead-on accurate than this. Bravo, Mr. Gingrich! It's a perfect, textbook example of everything the GOP's "leadership" has been doing dead wrong since roughly November 1994. Gingrich needs to hear from us, now.
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
- On other anti-industrialism fronts, Dr. William Gray, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, slammed Al Gore as "a gross alarmist" who "doesn't know what he's talking about" in an AP interview Saturday the 7th. Note: The AP story is interesting in its bias, in that its author Cain Burdeau makes several veiled insinuations that Gray is an old, dotty crank, by way of an ad hominem. As the great percussionist and lyricist Neil Peart put it, "You can twist perceptions / Reality won't budge";
- It turns out that the famous "poor helpless stranded polar bears" photo that "global warming" cultists splattered on the front pages of major newspapers like the New York Daily Socialist Worker...ermm..Times, London's "Times" and "Daily Mail," the international "Herald Tribune" and Canada's "Ottowa Citizen," as well as being referenced, infamously, by Herr Gore himself as heart-rending evidence of "global warming's" destructive effects, was...yet another fraud perpetrated by the "global warming scary story" crowd. The photo, depicting cute, cuddly polar bears supposedly stranded on a dwindling ice floe miles from shore due to "global warming":
...was in fact taken two and a half years earlier by an Australian marine biology student on a field trip - in the dead of August, when ice floes...typically melt.
D'OH!
- Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at M.I.T. - and one of those featured in The Great Global Warming Swindle - has gotten an excellent article published in the April 16 issue of Newsweek International. Conspicuous is the fact that the American edition of Newsweek for some odd reason hasn't seen fit to publish the same article... At any rate, Lindzen's article "Why So Gloomy?" is an excellent recap of several of the slam-dunk points made in "Swindle," along with a number of equally persuasive points (to a mind open to reason,) such as the nonexistence of an "optimal temperature" toward which to strive (if indeed human activity could change anything in either direction,) and the fact that global warming, if it were to occur, would be of vast benefit, not detriment, to virtually all life on Earth - a point touched on by Pepperdine economist George Reisman in his landmark 1990 essay The Toxicity of Environmentalism;
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Finally, though I'm loath to cover trivia generally falling within the province of tabloids, there was...the racism flap involving talk radio host Don Imus.
Yeah, his comments were mindless, offensive in the extreme against people having nothing to do with politics, and yeah, the man has clearly got some problems with race, and clearly he's an idiot. 'Part of a large club on that last, I think. But am I the only one getting the irony of...racists Jessie "Hymietown" Jackson and Alfred Brawley-Sharpton posing as his moral judges? "Birds of a feather," indeed.
You know, I think they all deserve each other. I say we deposit the three of them on a small island somewhere, so they can live out their days frothing at each other about the comparative wavelengths of light reflected by their pigmentation. "As important as your shoe size," indeed.
Next...
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