"Climate change," the scam formerly known as "global warming," has been exposed as the crypto-Marxist hoax many of us suspected for years that it was. In Copenhagen, at the ridiculous charade of a "summit" on the dangers of carbon emissions producing record carbon emissions, the lofty rhetoric about saving the planet and the long-suffering polar bears has been ripped down like a sheet covering an unfinished masterpiece. Underneath, the masterpiece turns out to be an ugly reality as old as human history, a good old fashioned shakedown, in which the greediest of the greedy, those assert the right confiscate the fruits of other people's labor, alternately threaten, whine, wheedle, and guilt their marks into coming across with the cash in the interest of "economic justice," or in this case, "climate justice."
With all that has happened -- the East Anglia e-mails, which revealed that supposedly respectable scientists were falsifying data, repressing any inconvenient findings, and trying to intimidate respected journals into marginalizing anyone who disputed their theory, the revelation that Al Gore made up numbers out of whole cloth and used them to support his claims of harm to those afore-mentioned polar bears, and the degeneration of the Copenhagen summit into an unintentional laugh riot -- you might think that proponents of the theory of anthropegenic climate change would be issuing apologies, returning the millions that they have earned from this racket, and moving on to more productive pursuits. There's as much chance of that happening as the purveyors of "eat all you want" weight loss miracles, herbal baldness cures and "male enhancement" pills admitting that their products are shams, and returning the beau coups of loot that they have extracted from the gullible.
Of course, the insistence of those involved in the "Save the Planet" scam on its continuing existence in which they are so invested, both personally and financially, is not a surprise. In this case, though, for many of the grifters, the motive goes beyond the obvious one of short-term personal enrichment
As well-detailed here in John Griffing's excellent piece, the environmental movement has always been less about Mother Earth and more about Papa Dollar, as in income redistribution, or "reparations." Like all religious zealots, radical leftists are driven by a vision of how human beings should live, and that vision requires that evil Amerika pay up for all the crimes committed against the rest of the world, especially the black and brown people who suffered at the hands of white Europeans. Say what you want about Marxists, they are very capable of taking the long view, and they don't give up easily.
Predictably, now that the "climate change" rationale may have lost a bit of its marketing appeal, the enviro left has returned to another page in their threadbare playbook, one first popularized nearly 40 years ago, reducing the scourge of the planet, human beings.
Diane Francis writes in the Financial Post:
The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.
A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.
What a great idea! Of course, there are a few details to work out, which Ms. Francis doesn't address, most specifically, how it would be implemented and enforced. I don't think she wants to mention those icky forced abortions that occur in China, as late as the 9th month of pregnancy. Perhaps that's because like Chinese officials, upon hearing about them, she would be shocked, shocked!
I wish that I could tell you that Ms. Francis is some wacky Canadian outlier, so we could all have a good laugh. Unfortunately, and sadly, some reading her piece did not react with laughter or outrage. They cheered this plan, and embraced it; specifically, CNN's resident curmudgeon, Jack Cafferty, who someone has managed to approach his dotage without learning how to take the pins out of his shirts. On the December 11 edition of "The Situation Room," he noted that "[t]here's too many people," and "it doesn't matter whether the globe heats up or doesn't."
If you really want to lose sleep over the future of this country, read the responses to Mr. Cafferty's question.
I can point to two reasons that seemingly smart, well-informed people can calmly discuss this blatantly ridiculous, unconstitutional and horrifying proposal. First, the gradual acceptance of the belief by the larger society that, depending of his mother's frame of mind, an unborn child is either an anticipated blessing or an ill-timed mistake to be dealt with, that is, eliminated quickly and clinically and forgotten as if they never existed, which eventually became enshrined in law through the tortured legal reasoning and overt judicial legislation that delivered Roe v. Wade.
Second, the equally insidious and stunning ignorance by what appears to be a disturbingly large percentage of Americans of a critical fact: that the U.S. Constitution protects individual liberty by limiting the power of the federal government. This fact has always irritated the "former constitutional law professor," who was actually an adjunct lecturer, who currently occupies the Oval Office. I hope that an actual professor would have more respect for our precious founding document, although I concede that given the left-wing re-education camps that call themselves universities today, that's not likely.
In fairness, pretend you are Barack Obama. I think that you can see how you would resent that pesky Constitution as an irritating obstacle, getting in the way of your plans to take one person's stuff and give it to someone more deserving, or to put it in his own words:
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.
The Founders understood that a government that "must do" things for you eventually degenerates into a government that does things to you. Barack Obama and his merry band of Marxists know that as well. They just hope that the rest of us won't figure it out any time soon.
How we got here, be it the culture of legalized abortion, liberal judicial activism, the dumbing down of the population by the public school system, or an increasing number of people looking to government to provide for their every need, it is chilling to consider where we find ourselves, a place where a couple of commentators on an allegedly serious news program can casually contemplate whether the United States of America should adopt the infanticide policies of a brutal, murderous dictatorship without the slightest mention of the restraints of our Constitution, and have viewers enthusiastically chime in about what a terrific idea it is.
People who thirty years ago warned of a slippery slope should have thought more in terms of a tiny step off a very steep cliff.
