The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Chicken Little Democrats

Posted on | June 2, 2017 | Comments Off on The Chicken Little Democrats

“It’s a shameful moment for the United States. . . . He’s made us an environmental pariah in the world.”
— John Kerry, on MSNBC

The liberal media’s all-Russia-all-the-time news coverage was interrupted yesterday when President Trump announced that he was repudiating the Paris Climate Accord, which the Obama administration had signed onto at the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And the reaction of failed 2004 Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry was typical of the sky-is-falling gloom-and-doom Chicken Little crowd. Failed 2000 Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore called Trump’s decision “reckless and indefensible.”

Claiming that nations which implement the U.N. regulations will benefit from the “jobs and industries created,” former President Obama said that Trump’s decision puts the United States among “a small handful of nations that reject the future.” Yes — surrender your economy to a bunch of U.N. bureaucrats, or else you “reject the future.”

This over-the-top reaction is indicative of how the Democrats and their media allies have become heavily invested in “climate change” as a crisis requiring government action. Having lived long enough to remember many previous examples of this liberal crisis-mongering behavior — e.g., Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb — I have good reason to be skeptical of alarmist “climate change” rhetoric. One reason young people are so easily convinced to vote Democrat is that young people haven’t had enough experience to acquire this kind of skepticism. Only after you have spent decades watching liberals gin up fears of a “crisis” (which they then exploit as an excuse to elect Democrats) do you recognize the familiar pattern Thomas Sowell describes in his book The Vision of the Anointed:

  • Stage 1, The “Crisis”: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed [leftists] propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a “crisis” … even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a “crisis” has in fact already been getting better for years.
  • Stage 2, The “Solution”: Policies to end the “crisis” are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and “simplistic,” if not dishonest.
  • Stage 3, The Results: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z.
  • Stage 4, The Response: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as “simplistic” for ignoring the “complexities” involved, as “many factors” went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.

The climate-change “crisis” is simply a political tactic. Parents need to warn their children about being deceived by such tactics.

“If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” Calvin Coolidge once said, and the kind of fear-mongering promoted by Democrats is not only dishonest, but it tends to undermine mental health. How much of the “epidemic” of depression among young people can be blamed on Democrats constantly hyping threats of a global catastrophe?

We have a “mental health crisis” among young people and if you think the solution to this “crisis” is to elect more Democrats, you’re crazy.



 

Category: Democrats, Donald Trump, Global Warming

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