Deception & Misdirection

Martian SUVs, the Zell Miller effect, and those racist Carsonites


[Continuing our series on deception in politics and public policy.]

A few short items this week: climate change on Mars, Kim Davis now has a party, and the RINOs are, as the kids say, showing the h8.

ITEM 1:

You may recall when the Clinton administration announced the discovery of “life on Mars”—actually, microfossils from a meteor that supposedly proved that life had existed on Mars in the distant past. It was the Story of the Century, or would have been, if it had turned out to be true and not a Clintonite hoax to knock the Republican National Convention off of magazine covers and off the top part of the front page of the country’s newspapers.

The reported evidence that water once flowed on Mars isn’t like that, exactly.

As reported by the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3252071/Mars-mystery-SOLVED-Nasa-confirms-bizarre-dark-finger-marks-red-planet-signs-water-flowing-beneath-surface.html ):

The possibility of finding life on Mars has come a significant step closer after Nasa announced a ‘major scientific discovery’ of flowing water on the red planet.

The agency has confirmed that ‘dark fingers’ spotted in Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) images are likely made by liquid moving across, or beneath, the planet’s surface. These marks, which lengthen and darken as the seasons change, are the first evidence of their kind ever found on another planet and are the first step in confirming life can exist on the alien world.

I haven’t had a chance yet to analyze the evidence, but, for now, I take the NASA folks at their word. (There are some good people/good scientists even at a corrupted agency like NASA, which is one reason the agency retracted its false claim that it had found 2014 to be “the hottest year on record.”…not that the news media noticed the retraction.)

There is one element of the reported discovery that, I expect, will be distorted for political purpose, because it shows the disastrous effect of “climate change.” Back to the Daily Mail:

‘This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water – albeit briny – is flowing today on the surface of Mars.’

The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience and are being discussed at a Nasa press conference at James Webb Auditorium in Nasa Headquarters, Washington.

‘Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,’ said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Speaking at the event, Michael Meyer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said: ‘If we go back 3 million years and look at Mars, it was a very different atmosphere.

‘It had a huge ocean, as large as two thirds of the Northern Hemisphere, and was a mile deep, but something happened. Mars suffered a major climate change and lost its surface water. Today we’re revolutionising our understanding of the planet.

Get that? “A major climate change.”

So…

…If “climate change” is caused by the activities of an advanced civilization—by the release of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” from power generation, manufacturing, transportation, and the like—where did the Martians get the SUVs and coal-fired power plants that caused the climate change on their planet?

It seems like a small point, but it’s actually important. Climate change is an inherent part of climate, at least anywhere that complex life can exist. Earth’s climate has been changing, warming and cooling and doing both at the same time, for billions of years. In recent human history, we’ve gone, for example, from having vineyards in northern England, to having a frozen Thames in springtime, and back to a point in-between. We’ve gone from warming in the mid-1800s to a cooling panic in the 1890s to warming in the 1930s and ’40s to cooling in the ’70s to warming in the ’80s to, for the past 17 years or more, stasis—most likely, warming and cooling trends roughly canceling each other out. At some point it will start getting warmer or cooler again, which, by itself, will tell us nothing about the degree to which human activity affects the climate.

Some people are starting to figure this out, that the existence of “climate change” on Mars is an important factor in this debate. (http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/12450/20150202/drastic-climate-change-carved-up-mars-still-happening.htm )

Drastic Climate Change Carved Up Mars, and May Still Be Happening

By Brian Stallard

Climate change isn’t an exclusively Earth-side affair. New analyses of gulley patterning carved into the sides of some of Mars’ largest impact craters has revealed that the Red Planet underwent many instances of severe climate shifting, including several ice ages, within the last two million years.

That’s at least according to a study recently published in the journal Icarus, which details how researchers assessed images of hundreds of gully-like features found on the walls of impact craters located along the mid-latitudes of Mars.

“These recent climate cycles have been predicted by computer models, but have not been documented with widespread geological evidence until now,” lead study author, Jay Dickson, said in a recent statement. “This research shows that gullies have been episodic across the entire southern hemisphere, a distribution that is required for this to be a signal of global climate change.”

Despite what popular media might lead you to believe, climate change is not an exclusively unnatural occurrence. The NOAA and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have revealed in past studies that the drastic climate changes Earth may be experiencing right now is largely driven by natural processes such as El Niño and La Niña events.

The concern, rather, is that humanity’s influence may be exacerbating or accelerating this change in such a way that important ecosystems are unable to adapt quickly enough. It has thus been demanded that world powers take action to mitigate this harmful influence.

Of course, in the case of Mars, there was no human influence to speak of, and thanks to its timeless dusty plains, we now have an excellent record of natural change on our hands.

“Greens” often phrase the key question as: Are humans contributing to climate change/Global Warming? But that’s an absurd question. When I light a match, I contribute to the amount of fire in the world. But to what degree do I contribute?

It’s one of several questions that the Warmers can’t answer, refuse to answer, don’t really want to answer because the answer might not line up with their ideology.

  • Is the earth warming? Is it warming globally, rather than warming in some places and cooling in others?
  • Is this warming catastrophic? Is it harmful at all? Is it beneficial, or is its effect a mix of good and bad effects?
  • Is this warming the result of human activities such as transportation, manufacturing, and power generation? If it is, to what degree is it caused by human activities? Is it 100 percent, 50 percent, zero-point-zero-zero-one percent, or what? (Conversely, how much of this warming would have occurred if technology had not advanced past the level of, say, the 18th Century? How much would have happened if no humans existed?)
  • To what degree is this warming caused by the technological production of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is the main target of Global Warming policies? How about other greenhouse gases—water, methane, et al.?
  • Can this warming be prevented by policies that are consistent with peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom? If not, what price will people pay in terms of peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom? If the warming cannot be prevented but merely mitigated, to what degree will it be mitigated and at what cost?

Most Global Warming activists can’t begin to answer these questions. Indeed, most can’t answer the most basic questions about how the world works. Next time you run into a Warmer, ask ’em some third-grade-level questions on weather and climate, and let the hilarity ensue.

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ITEM 2:

Finally, Kim Davis has a political party.

As I noted three weeks ago (http://capitalresearch.org/2015/09/kim-davis-unknown-rowan-county/ ), the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk was elected to office as a Democrat. Yet I saw one network news story after another after another that failed to mention her party. Almost all network news stories about public officials mention their party affiliations, yet Davis’s affiliation was ignored.

By this past weekend, I had seen 35 broadcast-network news stories on Davis without seeing or hearing a single mention of her party. Finally, though, things changed. Suddenly, her party affiliation became relevant. Suddenly, I started seeing stories that mentioned it, stories like this one (http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/26/politics/kim-davis-no-longer-democrat/ ):

Kentucky clerk Kim Davis no longer a Democrat

By Pat St. Claire, CNN Updated 7:04 PM ET, Sat September 26, 2015

(CNN)Kim Davis has said farewell to the Democratic Party. The Kentucky county clerk at the center of a fight over religious freedom and same-sex marriage says she is now a Republican.

“She has come to the conclusion that the Democratic Party has left her,” her lawyer, Mat Staver, said Saturday in a statement. “She has decided to switch her voter registration. However, the issue of religious freedom in this case is not a partisan issue. It is neither Republican nor Democrat. It is an inalienable right and what makes America the land of liberty.”

Staver said Davis “has been a lifelong Democrat but has received no support from the Democratic Party or leaders.” The party switch was revealed Friday when a Reuters reporter asked whether she’d ever considered switching parties. Davis replied, “I’ve already done that.” The controversial clerk says the rest of her family switched parties, too.

If you’re perceived as a bad person, as Davis is perceived by almost all members of the news media, and you’re a Democrat, the media downplay or ignore your party affiliation. Or, if you’re known to be a Democrat, the news media downplay or ignore anything in your background that might reflect negatively on their party.

I call it the Zell Miller effect.

In the summer of the year 2000, Zell Miller (D-Georgia) took a formerly Republican U.S. Senate seat after the incumbent senator died. Democrats celebrated his victory, which later (after Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched from Republican to independent in May 2001) gave Democrats control of the Senate until the 2002 election. Miller had a mostly conservative voting record as a senator, and, had he switched to the GOP to counteract the Jeffords switch, Republicans would have had control of the Senate in the early years of the Bush 43 administration.

But he never switched. One reason, I suggested back then, was that, as a Democrat, he was immune to the sort of criticism that he would get if he were a Republican. For one thing, as a Democrat he had escaped criticism for being the former chief of staff to segregationist Governor Lester Maddox. I joked that, “The minute he switches to the Republicans, he’ll suddenly become ‘former Lester Maddox chief of staff Zell Miller.’”

In December 2002, James Taranto, who does the great “Best of the Web” blog for the Wall Street Journal, wrote about the fact that two former segregationists would be serving in the incoming U.S. Senate—Robert Byrd (West Virginia), a former Ku Klux Klan officer, and Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (South Carolina), who, as governor, raised the Confederate battle flag over the state capitol. He left one out, as I noted. Taranto wrote:

Yesterday we noted that the 108th Congress will include two senators who were once segregationists: Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and Robert Byrd of West Virginia, both Democrats. Reader Steven Allen writes: “You’re forgetting Sen. Zell Miller, who was executive secretary to Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia (1967-71). Maddox became infamous in 1964 when he and his customers, with pick handles and a gun, chased African-Americans from his restaurant, the Pickrick. Other than George Wallace, Maddox was the most famous segregationist governor of the 1960s. I’m sure one reason Miller isn’t inclined to switch parties is that he knows that as a Republican, he would no longer be given a pass over his ‘seg’ past.”

My prediction turned out to be correct, more or less. Miller never did switch parties officially, but he was keynote speaker at the 2004 Republican national convention, strongly endorsing President Bush for reelection. It was at that point that the knives came out.

Typical was this quote, included by the Media Research Center in its list of the most biased news media quotes of 2004, included this one (at http://archive.mrc.org/notablequotables/bestof/2004/bestquote.asp):

“Zell Miller’s speech [at the GOP convention] was a speech of hate, it was a speech of venom. This is a man who started his political career with Lester Maddox and last night he imitated Lester Maddox. Lester Maddox, as we all know, was a segregationist, but he was a man of hate. Zell Miller is not a segregationist, not that at all. . . . [But] I grew up in the South, I’ve seen the face of anger, I’ve seen the face of hatred. . . . There are lines in politics and that speech went over the line.” — U.S. News & World Report Editor-at-Large David Gergen during MSNBC’s live coverage following Miller’s speech to the Republican National convention, September 2, 2004.

Why did Zell Miller stay a Democrat for so long? Because being a Democrat carries with it certain privileges.

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ITEM 3:

In presidential polls, so-called “outsiders” are outscoring Establishment Republicans by four or five to one. (The outsiders include Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina, who’ve never held elected office, as well as officeholders elected in 2010 as Tea Party candidates, including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul.) Last year, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated in a GOP primary, in one of the great upsets in decades. Now, John Boehner has been forced to resign as Speaker in the face of intense opposition from reformers.

The RINOs are starting to freak out, and starting to do what they do best—smear their intraparty rivals.

Consider the case of Matthew Dowd. Dowd was chief strategist for the 2004 Bush re-election campaign, which is considered one of the worst-run campaigns ever. (It won, by a whisker, because the Democrats nominated the weakest major-party candidate of my lifetime, John Kerry. Kerry, you may recall, was a man who first gained fame by lying to Congress about supposed “war crimes” committed by U.S. soldiers; who once attended a meeting of his group, the extremist “Vietnam Veterans Against the War,” at which participants seriously discussed assassinating members of Congress; and who claimed to have worked on a secret mission for President Nixon in December 1968, a month before Nixon actually became president. If you don’t know those things about Kerry, that’s because of the utter incompetence of the Bush campaign. Bush barely beat Kerry; it was so close that the initial exit polls had Kerry winning.)

Nowadays, Dowd is a regular participant in the panel discussion on ABC’s This Week with [Clinton operative] George Stephanopoulos. On that panel, he represents the point of view of RINOs—Republicans who accept the premises put forth by the Left and, thus, refuse to fight for the things the party is supposed to believe in. (A RINO is not a moderate. For example, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is a moderate but not a RINO, while House Speaker John Boehner is a RINO but not a moderate. Boehner, I am convinced, believes in the party’s principles. He just won’t lift a finger to fight for them. RINOs are like the high-level veterans of the 1964 Goldwater campaign who fiercely opposed the nomination of Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980 because the lesson they took from the Goldwater defeat was that no conservative—no one like themselves—could win.)

On Sunday, Dowd expressed the view of many RINOs regarding the sharp criticism by mainstream Republicans of Boehner’s speakership. [Dowd stumbled over his words a little, so I edited it for coherence.]

I actually think this is [less] reflective [about] what the conservatives think about the speaker and the leadership [than] what they think of President Obama and the fact that they’re upset that America has changed. That’s what there really upset about. America is now less white, less married, less churched, less conservative, and that is a difficult prospect for them to face in the course of this.

Yep, non-RINOs just can’t tolerate the idea of a society in which African-Americans, Latinos, and women play leading roles. That’s why, in order to restore the white patriarchy, so many of them are backing Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina for president, and booing the multicultural, transgender John Boehner. (I’m just joking. Boehner, though, is nonwhite, i.e., orange.)

 

 

 

 

Dr. Steven J. Allen

A journalist with 45 years’ experience, Dr. Allen served as press secretary to U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton and as senior researcher for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. He earned a master’s…
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