Albert the Not-So-Great

Think what you want about George W. Bush, but he did do this: he saved us from a Gore Presidency. Is there a greater smelly stew of vanity, vacuity, ignorance, arrogance, and hubris in Washington than Albert Gore Jr.? This spoiled man-child of a wealthy racist senator, after having lost - several times, in fact! - his presidential bid in 2000, proceeded to collect a Nobel Prize (Or was it the Stalin Prize?) for elevating the cartoon show science of global warming into something otherwise serious people actually ponder ("No, we couldn't possibly build a missile shield to keep Kim Jong Il from nuking Seoul or President Haman of Iran from turning Tel Aviv into radioactive wastes, but we can stop the cyclical changes in planetary temperature.")

Now he makes one of those tiresome "analogies" that so enchant the Left. The campaign to half global warming is the "moral equivalent" of our fight against the Nazis in the Second World War. At the risk of stating the stunningly obvious, no it is not. The Nazis constructed deliberate policies intended to murder tens of millions of innocent people and to enslave hundreds of millions more. They developed weapon systems, like nerve gas, "Vengeance" missiles, and Blitzkrieg to stampede people into irrational, terrified, chaotic mistakes. The strategy of Nazism was a combination of terror and deception.

Wait a minute! Maybe Al is onto something after all! The Storm troopers of the Global Warming Party do not want to "discuss" whether the planet is warming or cooling or whether the process is natural or man made. Their "science" is just as immutable and absolute as, say, the Aryan Science of the Nazis or the weird genetic theories of Lysenko in Stalinist Russia. That is to say, the science of global warming is driven exclusively by political ideology - intolerant political ideology.

The consequences of implementing Al's version of "Aryan science" would inconvenience greatly Americans and Europeans, a price that a rich chubby old man like Al is willing for us to make, but in those other parts of the world, the implementation of his "Aryan science" would have effects at least as deadly as Frau Carson's "science" which led to banning DDT (i.e. a few dozen million or so non-Aryans died.)

Silent Spring led directly to an explosion of malaria in the Third World and the deaths of countless children. Global Warming Hoaxology would lead to a dramatic downturn - a carefully calculated downturn - in the global economy. What that means is that to please Al Gore's dubious aesthetic and his party-line science, many innocent poor people - people "in the way," so to speak - will have to be reduced. Call it the "liquidation of the Kulak Class" or call it the "Final Solution to..." (the Nazis had more than one ghastly "Final Solution" in the works.)

So, Al does have a point. His insistent imposition of a flaky theory upon hundreds of millions of innocent people trying to live happy, safe, and hopeful lives is, in one way, equivalent to the war against Nazism. The rest of the world in 1939 just wanted to be left alone. The world was imperfect (always has been and always will be) and science was a constantly evolving, often contradictory; a grand mud puddle which often produced miracles and sometimes produced nuttiness, but was very seldom absolute (Oh, except in Nazi Germany and in Stalinist Russia, where all scientists everywhere agreed on everything - at least the ones not in camps.)

Hitler fretted about racial pollution much like Gore frets about thermal pollution. People - those creatures who religious people think have souls - are to men like Hitler, Stalin, and Gore more like eggs. And one can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Al is not Hitler or Stalin, of course. He is rather a pompous nothing in search of a something. He is the heir of a bigot's legacy in search of a legacy of his own. He is a boy always told that he would amount to something and intends to make that dream come true, whatever the costs to mankind. He is a former Tennessee senator whose father was a Tennessee senator and who never became president because he could not carry Tennessee. He is the quintessence of irrelevance, who will continue to make outrageous statements until some grown up notices him. If that means comparing decent and ordinary businessmen, farmers, and industrialists to Nazis, fine; if it means comparing the highly dubious claims of global warming with the monstrously certain evil of the Holocaust, that's fine with him too. He just wants some attention. Poor little boy.