White House Ignores War In Afghanistan To Pursue New War On Fox News

Up until the exaltation of The One – may socialist Scandinavians place golden medallions around his neck forever – the Democrats’ spiel on Afghanistan was that it was the right war, the top priority war, the just war, the necessary war, but that the devil Bush ignored Afghanistan while he focused on Iraq.

Iraq, of course, was the unwinnable war (even after Bush won it), and the surge strategy was bound to be a costly failure (even after it worked).

Well, now that Obama – in the words of a leftist “journalist” – “stands above the country” and “above the world” as “sort of God,” well, the “change” the left kept blathering about resulted in a change of focus:

Afghanistan is no longer the “war of necessity,” or the “top priority,” or the “cause that could not be more just.”  Nope.  That war morphed into the war that the White House has declared on Fox News.

White House communications director, Anita Dunn:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director.

And:

“The reality of it is that Fox often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

And:

“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Mind you, every major totalitarian dictator in the world is more “legitimate” than Fox News, as far as the White House is concerned:

White House communications director Anita Dunn also said this:

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Yes, that’s right.  Dunn is referring to CNN — the same CNN that demonstrated that it is so completely in the tank for the Obama agenda that it actually “FACT-CHECKED” a Saturday Night Live skit.

That’s the criteria for “a news network”: complete ideological loyalty.

Obama pretty much pointed that out himself when he addressed White House correspondents:

“Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me.  Apologies to the Fox table.”

Unlike all the other media, Fox correspondents didn’t vote for Obama.  And that’s enough to declare war.  For all must love The One.  No dissension can be tolerated.

Mind you, while the White House asserts that Fox News is evil because it – alone by itself – is not in the tank with Obama, it’s interesting to see that Obama himself is in the tank for SEIU and the hard-core union agenda as he vows to “paint the nation purple.”

We’ve seen this reaction to media criticism by a president before – from the darkest and most evil days of Richard Nixon.  It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t end well.

Is Fox the media arm of the Republican Party?  Viewers who are flocking to Fox News in droves don’t seem to think so:

Fox News Channel was the 2nd highest rated cable channel on all of television during the first quarter of 2009 in prime time Total Viewers. CNN was 17th and MSNBC 24th for the first three months of the year. FNC beat CNN and MSNBC combined and gained the most compared to the first quarter of 2008, up 24%. 2009’s first quarter was FNC’s 3rd highest rated quarter in prime time in the network’s history — just behind Q4 ’08 and Q3 ’05. In prime time, ages 25-54 demo, and in total day in both categories, FNC grew more year-to-year than CNN and MSNBC combined. FNC had nine of the top 10 programs on cable news in Total Viewers.

The hardly right-wing UCLA seems to find plenty of bias from all of those journalists that Obama boasted voted for him, rather than Fox:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

To the extent that Fox News is biased to the right, every single other news outlet is biased toward the left.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs’ study concluded that Fox News was in fact the most fair and balanced network, concluding:

Fox News Channel’s coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly — 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates — 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.

Sacred Heart University’s media study discovered that Fox News was the most trusted in the nation:

Researchers were asked which national television news organization they trusted most for accurate reporting. Fox News was named by 30.0% of all respondents – up from 19.5% in 2003 and 27.0% in 2007.

Those named most frequently as the television news organization most trusted for accurate reporting in 2009 included: Fox News (30.0%), CNN (19.5%), NBC News (7.5%) and ABC News (7.5%). Fox News was also the television news organization trusted least. Just over one-quarter, 26.2%, named Fox News, followed by NBC News (9.9%), MSNBC (9.4%), CNN (8.5%), CBS News (5.3%) and ABC News (3.7%).

In fact, it didn’t come all that far from being TWICE as trusted as the runner-up, CNN (the network that fact-checks SNL sketches that are negative to Obama).

So this war – that again seems to be replacing the “just war of necessity” that Afghanistan was SUPPOSED to be is just ridiculous.

It merely shows just how dramatically ideological this administration truly is.

It also explains why former longtime ABC correspondent Chris Wallace said of the Obama administration:

“They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Let’s just take a second to consider what Obama seems to think about the media, as evidenced by his selection of Mark Lloyd to be his FCC Diversity Czar.  Remember that cartoon of dictators that Obama has met with?  Obama’s FCC Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd admiringly said this of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez:

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela….The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Just as Obama is now taking Fox News seriously in this country.

But how did Hugo Chavez “take very seriously the media”?

Newsbusters answers that by simply pointing to the facts in Venezuela:

NGOs Warn of Restrictions in Pending Venezuela Law

Associated Press – May 7, 2009

Prominent Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations warned Thursday that a bill being drafted by lawmakers loyal to President Hugo Chavez could be used to financially strangle groups that criticize the government.

Chavez clamps down on broadcast media

Irish Examiner – Friday, July 10, 2009

President Hugo Chavez’s government is imposing tough new regulations on Venezuela’s cable television while revoking the licenses of more than 200 radio stations.

Report: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez aggressively seizing control of media

Miami Herald – August 14, 2009

An unclassified report lists examples of Venezuelan government efforts to crack down on or seize control of media outlets to stifle criticism.

How’s that for a chronology of authoritarian censorship?

And Obama’s choice for FCC Diversity Czar also had this to say:

[From a 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice]: “Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions.  And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem.

We’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.”

It’s nice of Mark Lloyd to acknowledge that there are “good white people” around – just before he announces the need to have a purge of white people from the media.  But Mark Lloyd is a racist who has also said:

“There are few things I think more frightening in the American mind than dark skinned black men. Here I am.”

And Barack Obama also showed what he thought about free speech rights when his selection for FCC Diversity Czar said:

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

“[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”

So we pretty much know where the Obama White House is coming from: the media should be the exclusive tool of leftist propaganda to advance the Obama agenda.  Only Obama voters need apply to be considered as “journalists.”  Free speech is a terribly overrated thing, which needs to be “reinterpreted” to exclude ANYONE who has ANYTHING but a far-leftist revolutionary agenda.  And Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has provided the American left with the model as to how to proceed in that direction.

Obama is dithering around in Afghanistan while our soldiers languish and die for lack of support.  But he seems all to willing to pursue his war on Fox News with a gusto.

In both the war in Afghanistan and the war on Fox News, the threat is to freedom itself.

Meet Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize Winner and Global Warming Demagogue

We can go back and look at Al Gore, a documented fraud, a presenter of entirely false scientific claims, and the winner of a Nobel Prize for science.  A British High Court judge found nine “glaring” scientific errors in the Inconvenient Truth “documentary” that garnered Gore his scientific credibility.  But the only “inconvenient truth” was that the film was an example of “alarmism” and “exaggeration” and was not fit for viewing by British school children.

“Science” has officially and for the record made itself a propaganda tool to advance radical redistributionist social policies.

And now we have another Nobel prize winner doing the same thing to his own field of economics.

An Interview With Thomas Schelling, Part Two

CLARKE: I wanted to go back to the international climate-change negotiation process. So assuming we had a perfect U.S. bill — written by you or by 15 experts working on this full time — how would the international negotiation process work? It’s not obvious that averting global climate change is in the rational self-interest of anyone that is alive today. The serious consequences probably won’t occur until 2080 or 2100 or thereafter. That’s one problem. Another problem is that those consequences are going to be distributed in a radically uneven way. The northwest of the United States might actually benefit. So how does a negotiation process work? How does a generation today negotiate on behalf of future generations? And how do we negotiate when the costs are distributed so unevenly?

SCHELLING: Well I do think that one of the difficulties is that most of the beneficiaries aren’t yet born. More than that: Most of the beneficiaries will be born in what we now call the developing world. By 2080 or 2100 five-sixths of the population, at least, will be in places like China, India, Indonesia, Africa and so forth. And what I don’t know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese.

SCHELLING: It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there’s a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane from permafrost, and from huge offshore deposits of methane all around the world. If you begin to get methane leaking on a large scale — even though methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere very long — it might warm things up fast enough that it will induce further methane release, which will warm things up more, which will release more. And that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious.

CLARKE: And you mean serious for everyone, including the United States?

SCHELLING: Yes, for almost anybody.

CLARKE: And when you say, “exaggerate the costs” do you mean, American politicians should exaggerate the costs to the American public, to get American support for a bill that will overwhelmingly benefit the developing world?

SCHELLING: [Laughs] It’s very hard to get honest people.

SCHELLING: Well, part of me sympathizes with the case for disingenuousness! I mean, it seems to me that there is a strong moral case for helping unborn Bangladeshi citizens. But I don’t know how you sell that. It’s not in anyone’s rational interest, at least in the US, to legislate on that basis.

Well, let me at least agree with Thomas Schelling to this extent: yes, it is indeed hard to find honest people.  Especially from our “experts” whom we count upon to inform us of the facts, rather than leading us by the hand to conclusions based on false premises becauses they are arrogant elitists who think only they are smart enough to handle the truth.

The article goes on – read it here – with a seriously leftist-tilted back-and-forth about climate change and the degree to which America is morally obligated to commit economic hari kari in order to atone for its sins to the developing world.

Then we get to the moral nitty gritty to end the article:

CLARKE: I wanted to ask one more question, to go back to the moral issue here. It does seem to me that the strongest case for mitigating the effects of global climate change is a moral one. It is based not on our own interest but on the interests of people in the developing world who don’t yet exist. But it also seems to me that — while I don’t know much about game theory — collective bargaining theories generally assume the participants are rational and self-interested. So how does one go about making sense of an arrangement where we must set our self-interest aside? How does one make the moral case in a situation like this? Or is my description of collective bargaining just totally idiotic?

SCHELLING: Well, I think you have to realize that most people have very strong moral feelings. I think in a lot of cases they’re misdirected. I wish moral feelings about a two-month old fetus were attached to hungry children in Africa. But I think people have very strong moral feelings. In fact, I’m always amazed by the number of people who at least pretend they’re worried about the polar bears. […]

SCHELLING: And I think the churches don’t realize that they could have a potent effect in not letting so much of god’s legacy — in terms of flora and fauna — be destroyed by climate change.

SCHELLING: But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Now, Thomas Schelling one the one hand tells us that we should feel intensely morally obligated to “beneficiaries [who] not yet born” – as long as they’re not “a two month old fetus” who is presumably about to be aborted – in which case we apparently have absolutely no obligation at all.  But stop and think: the moral logic of abortion means the future generation doesn’t matter unless we subjectively want them to matter.  No one who advocates abortion has any right to lecture others that they should not only care about but sacrifice for “beneficiaries not yet born.” Then Schelling proceeds to presume from his own massive personal arrogance that the American people’s moral intuitions are faulty, but that his are functioning perfectly.  Which of course justifies him in lying to us to steer us toward the conclusion dictated by his own superior moral reasoning.

And then this man who presumes himself to be so morally superior to everyone “beneath” him, who is entitled to “exaggerate the threat” of global warming because Americans are not responsible to make sound moral decisions if they know the truth, says he hopes “horrid things” happen to we the poor, the huddling, the ignorant and unwashed masses.

This economist seems to live more by the law involving the telling of a lie often enough that it is believed far more than by the law of supply and demand.

It’s funny that Schelling mentions polar bears, as an admitted global warming exaggerator now proceeds to run into the pseudo-science of another global warming exaggerator.  And you have – unlike Al Gore or Thomas Schelling, who have credibility in the scientific community without having any ethical integrity – a genuine scientist being persecuted because he cares about the truth:

One of the world’s leading polar bear experts has been told to stay away from an international conference on the animals because his views are “extremely unhelpful,” according to an e-mail by the chairman of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, Dr. Andy Derocher.

The London Telegraph reports Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor has more than 30 years of experience with polar bears. But his belief that global warming is caused by nature, not man, led officials to bar him from this week’s polar bear specialist group meeting in Denmark.

Taylor says the polar bear population has actually increased over the last 30 years. He says the threat to them by melting Arctic ice — illustrated by a famous photo taken by photographer Amanda Byrd — has become the most iconic cause for global warming theorists. The photo is often used by former Vice President Al Gore and others as an example of the dangers faced by the bears. But it was debunked last year by the photographer, who says the picture had nothing to do with global warming, and that the bears were not in danger. The photographer said she just happened to catch the bears on a small windswept iceberg.

And we have the same types of people as Thomas Schelling suppresing the conclusions of science that show the opposite of what they want science to show.  Consider the White House’s suppression of a scientific report by the EPA.

Or you can go back to the “hockey stick model” to see just how far “respected” scientists are willing to go in order to pass off a bogus theory for mass consumption — and just how willing other scientists are to unquestioningly accept whatever “evidence” supports their preconceived ideological notions.

Harvard economist Martin Feldstein apparently lacks Thomas Schelling’s godlike view, and thus doesn’t seem to think he possesses the divine right to distort the truth in order to lead Americans to the conclusions he ordains as “moral.”

Feldstein simply looks at the economics – which, who knows, may be a strange thing for an economist to do these days – and concludes:

Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States. […]

In my judgment, the proposed cap-and-trade system would be a costly policy that would penalize Americans with little effect on global warming. The proposal to give away most of the permits only makes a bad idea worse. Taxpayers and legislators should keep these things in mind before enacting any cap-and-trade system.

Aside from the fact that building scientific evidence indicates that global warming is a gigantic load of malarkey (just consider how the fact that the planet ISN’T warming has now led the alarmist movement to instead begin using the term “climate change”), global warming-turned climate change alarmists have an even bigger problem to worry about: the fact that the developing world has no interests in committing their own versions of hari kari for the sake of a theory.  China and India are poised to become “global warming polluters” on such a scale that any reductions in American and European greenhouse gasses would be utterly insignificant.  So why should we dramatically undermine our lives?

Chinese and Indians know what it’s like to live in a mud hut, which is the inevitable result of dramatically hamstringing our economic output to conform to the demands of the global warming alarmists.  The western radicals either don’t know what such deplorable conditions are like, or they believe that they – being the true arrogant elitists they are – will continue to live in their glass houses or ivory towers.

Global Warming? Al Gore and the Crisis of Global Stupidity

Call me a Global Stupidity theorist.

I have come to believe that one of the greatest crises that mankind faces today is due to anthropogenic global stupidity.

Runaway global warming alarmism has pushed pseudo-science superheated emissions to dangerous levels much faster than previously estimated and, instead of reaching the threshold within a decade, it was actually crossed two years ago. Anthropogenic global stupidity may have pushed earth past the tipping point, according to one study.

I’m ridiculing these idiots, obviously. But you have to laugh at such paranoid nonsense.

Al Gore, the “patron saint” of global warming alarmism is more of a “patent stooge.”

Al Bore showed up on NBC’s Meet the Press on July 20, 2008 and had this to say:

VICE PRES. GORE: Well, I, I mean, I think there’s a consensus now that it’s happening even more rapidly than the scientists were telling us years ago. We’re seeing record high temperatures. Nine of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have, have been in the last couple of decades. We’re seeing the stronger storms. We’re seeing the damage that, that people–and our national security experts–the military intelligence, the Pentagon, the National Intelligence Defense Council–they have warned us about the national security threats from potentially hundreds of millions of climate refugees caused by the climate crisis. This is really–just this, this past week, the EPA said the American way of life is threatened.

Shortly after the rambling hypocrite left the state to presumably go back to his mansion that uses twenty times more energy than anyone else’s, Tom Brokaw said this of Bore:

MR. BROKAW: Chuck Todd, David Gregory, welcome to both of you. Let’s begin with Al Gore.

He’s tan, rested, but apparently not ready to go back into government, Chuck. Let me just offer a proposition. No one is better informed on this issue of energy conservation and global climate change than he is, no one is more passionate about it. But this issue breaks along party lines as you go across the country. Do you think it is, in part, because in the eyes of Republicans and those on the right, he is still very much a radioactive political figure, and he would be better off if he appeared on stage

Well, under the theory that “No one is better informed on this issue of energy conservation and global climate change than Al Gore is,” you’d at least expect him to get his pertinent facts somewhat correct.

But nope. Al spouts off debunked idiocy the way Jesus spouted off universal wisdom. His claim that “We’re seeing record high temperatures. Nine of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have, have been in the last couple of decades”? Just plain NOT.

NASA was forced to revise its rankings for the hottest years on record after a blogger – A BLOGGER – discovered serious mathematical errors in the process that the agency so advanced it sends rockets to Mars had relied upon to advance the global warming myth.

The new figures are available at this official NASA/GISS site. The higher the positive annual mean figure, the warmer the year was.

According to NASA’s revised data, the hottest 10 years on record, beginning with the hottest, actually are:

1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

Five of the top ten occur prior to 1940, before mainstream scientists believe humans had any discernible impact on temperatures, and six of the top ten hottest years occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred.

That doesn’t sound nearly as good as “Nine of the 10 hottest years on record,” though. Al Gore is a firm believer in the old pseudo-scientific adage, “If the facts get in the way of my theory, so much the worse for the facts.”

I’ve got a better “Nine out of 10” sort of figure for you.

A British judge who was asked to rule on whether Al Bore’s Inconvenient Truth movie could be distributed throughout the nation’s schools ruled that there were nine glaring scientific errors in the film, and that Al Gore was using “alarmism” and “exaggeration.”

Reason Magazine ripped Al Gore’s credibility to shreds.

That didn’t stop Gore from garnering a Nobel Prize. Apparently, Joseph Goebbels-like propaganda tactics are now perfectly acceptable in today’s postmodern version of “science.” If your ideology is suitably politically correct, it no longer matters if all your “facts” are actually wrong. It is downright scary.

Al Gore is just as wrong about his continued propaganda myth of “scientific consensus.”

And he’s making scientifically indefensible and, yes, alarmist and exaggerated claims regarding storms as well. It is the number of people living along coastal areas, rather than global warming, that is the most worrisome trend taking place.

And to debunk the last claim in his quote, describing “hundreds of millions of climate refugees caused by the climate crisis,” realize that one of the nine documented “alarmist and exaggerated” claims referred to an Al Gore claim that “low lying Pacific atolls have already been evacuated.” It’s simply false. The man doesn’t need facts when hysterical claims suit his agenda better.

The discovery of a tropical heat vent that computer climate models do not take into account could reduce the threat of global warming to meaninglessness. The journal Science published a seventeen year study of Greenland’s ice sheet that flatly contradicts the hysterical reports and bogus claims from nutjobs like Al Bore. And World Climate Report has an article titled “Antarctic Ice: A Global Warming Snow Job?” that similarly shows the bogus hyper-alarmism surrounding that region. Another study just released shows that Greenland’s ice – in contradiction to alarmist theories – has easily survived previous global warmings and very likely will survive many more.

I’ve written previous articles detailing some of the vast research that has proven that “global warming” is NOT caused by man, but rather is a cyclical natural phenomena occurring roughly every 1,500 years. And I’ve written about the problem of ideology taking the place of genuine science, and the fact that scientists are literally being persecuted for debunking outright academic fraud and self-serving scientific errors.

“Global warming” is very likely not a serious problem for mankind (believe me, it’s a LOT better than an ice age!), but the real and growing threat of “global stupidity” looms larger than ever. And there seems to be no answer to this crisis.