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| View From the Ridge |
Conservatives are now the single largest ideological group in America, according to Gallup.
The Wisconsin Democrats scampering across the state line to Illinois in a futile attempt to dodge reality turned out to be an apt metaphor of the state of American Progressivism. It is in collapse. On the run. Reviled, discredited, angry and sullen...
I get the impression that progressives really do believe we should all just fall in line and let the philosopher kings implement Plato's Republic. I think ordinary Americans sense it as well, and they are repelled. I know I am.
Al Gore as Metaphor: A Global Collapse
I think progressivism may be facing a global rejection as well. Oh, it will always be around, and could even achieve a new ascendancy thanks to unrepentant global financial predators, but for now it is facing a shameful repudiation, encapsulated nicely in the the discredited "Climate Change/Global Warming" movement.
Gore has the Midas touch in reverse; objects of great value (Nobel prizes, Oscars) turn dull and leaden at his touch. (Walter Russell Mead)Remember just a few short years ago, before the scandals and the lies, when serious people took the Global Elmer Gantry and his International Climate Change Road Show seriously...
The third world kleptocrats volunteering their oppressed masses to play the role of Lazarus in this opera of the absurd, begging for scraps at the table of the rich nations, in order to shame them out of their billions, was a nice filigree.
Here's a hint. Anyone or any organization employing the word "global" or "world" in a serious manner should be avoided. Categorically so when spinning fairy tales about the world being tooooo hot....
Especially when just 20 years ago the cognoscenti told us it was tooooooo cold!
Professor Walter Russell Mead sums up Gore's (and progressivism's) credibility problem:
Especially when just 20 years ago the cognoscenti told us it was tooooooo cold!
Professor Walter Russell Mead sums up Gore's (and progressivism's) credibility problem:
But grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world. He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry.
A father of four, he can lecture the world on the perils of overpopulation. Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents. (The Failure of Al Gore)
Gore's Global theater of high drama has descended into farce, an emblem of the High Church of Progressivism, and Al Gore is its apotheosis.
Walter Russell Mead - The Death of Global Warming
Walter Russell Mead - The Death of Global Warming
34 comments:
Gore has the Midas touch in reverse...)
That's called Gore's Minus Touch.
Remember the Ozone Hole of the 1980's? How this was going to let in raw solar ultraviolet which was going to cook us alive?
Gee, what happened to that global disaster? Nothing, except a lot of useless federal regulation of cooling systems.
Seems like the Ozone Hole fiasco was Global Climate Change Scare 1.0 - which failed miserably. Then came 2.0 which was Global Warming trumpeted by the Algore. Well, those hacked emails pretty much caused a blue screen of death on that one.
Global Manmade Disaster 3.0 seems to be now "Climate Cooling Change" - arrgh.
Yes, Al Gore seems like a juggernaut that keeps going shorter distances every time he is push-started. His gravitas is almost zero and won't recover. Thank God.
I remember it well, as they say.
Ya, well, it DID give Al what's estimated to be about $100 million, so...all was not ALL lost :-)
I remember nobody else laughed quite as hard as I did when the mantra went from GLOBAL WARMING to GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE because it got COLD! oops, that nasty, pesky stuff of facts got in the way.
Batten down the hatches, here come the comments that:
-you conservatives hate the oceans
-you conservatives hate clean air
-you conservatives still think America's exceptional and that's bad
-etc etc
And, ol' Al, who preaches the waters will be encroaching onto the coasts higher and higher, purchased an extremely expensive house in Northern California which hangs right over that ocean area which he says will be too flooded for occupants. THAT's weird, huh? :)
We'll see how your predictions of the collapse of the progressive movement turn out in 2012.
When an uber-pinko such as Maxine Waters (D-Ca) starts ragging on Barry, we can all clearly see that things are not all huggies and kissies in their Liberal Utopia.
And Z above is right: once they take their seats on the back benches of congress, let the epithets fly from their angry lips: the conservative majority consists of nothing but traitors, killers, tyrants and thieves.
I can hardly wait...
Nobel Prizes use to mean something. Now, not so much. Think Krugman, Obama Gore...
Fredd: Not a prediction, but an observation based upon voting patterns and polling. I still could be wrong though....
I seriously doubt that "Progressives" are in retreat so much as the "Progressive media" has ceased to dominate ALL media. There is no "Mainstream Media" any more (the 3 networks are now 1,000 cable networks). There is just "media". I think we're only just waking up to the fact that the so-called "Mainstream Media" never was very "mainstream." It was always a left-bank dominated operation.
This poll does not show proessivism "in decline." The polls on ideological identification have been the same for years.
On the issues things look a lot different.
Most Americans want higher taxes on the wealthy, universal healthcare, cutting defense spending, keeping Medicare and SS as they are, higher pay for teachers (though they are against tenure), higher taxes to pay for schools, more infrastructure spending, and on and on.
So, while people may identify as "conservative" or "liberal" or whatever, moderates are still the largest group, and between them and people to the left, we are in the majority on most important issues of the day.
Also, the GOP congress is far less popular than the president, and his numbers are pretty low right now. Don't think all Americans are like you guys - amnesiacs who forgot who made the mess we have today.
JMJ
@ JMJ,
No one has forgotten who made the mess and is the reason for Silvers post.
"moderates are still the largest group"
Wrong, even Silvers link shows this.... And the trend contines.
42% in 2010, up 2% points from Silvers 2009 link.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/141032/2010-conservatives-outnumber-moderates-liberals.aspx
And conservatives still out number moderates.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/145271/Conservatives-Continue-Outnumber-Moderates-2010.aspx
>amnesiacs who forgot who made the mess we have today.
Oh, we haven't forgotten that the people who made the mess were the big-government Republicans and the huge-government Democrats.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/148745/political-ideology-stable-conservatives-leading.aspx
If you lump "conservative" in with "very conservative" then yes, they are the largest group. But if you are realistic, and you consider where American majorities are on the issues , than it is obvious the vast majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle.
And if you guys think the largest block of Americans are with you guys, than you're nuts!
JMJ
No one has forgotten who made the mess
---------------
Well it started with the useless Saint Ronnie Raygun -- encouraged terrorism, started deregulation, raised taxes on the middle class
Then we go to Clintoon who built on the deregulation fiasco and kissed Greenspan's ass
Then you have The Dauphin - now there are some posters here (Silverfiddle is not one of them) who think so infrequently that the morons believe the crisis was caused by insufficient equity to cover CRA defaults rather than moves like Goldman leveraging bad paper at 50 to 1.
But of course it is all Obama who has done nothing but extend Bush's policies.
Baggers are morons.
Who's going to play Al Gore in the TV movie?
Perhaps Rosie O'Donnell?
Talk to any business owner and the main thing holding them back,other than demand,is Obamacare,Dodd Frank,the EPA(Cap and Trade) and Obama and the democrats in general.
Talk to people and the ones who need Universal Health care now are those losing their jobs,thanks to all the above. What good is free health care when people have no jobs to pay for rent,food,heating,gas for their cars and electric.
Looking forward to being Brazil's biggest customer.
Too bad it took them 3 years to find out what the "teabaggers" already knew.
What we could use is an economy that can sustain the democrats' big government wet dream.
Everyone is wrong on where and how "it" started.
"It" started over a hundred years ago with the advent of
A) the Industrial Revolution,
B) Karl Marx,
C) The Labor Movement,
D) The Fabian Society,
E) The Progressive Movement in the USA,
F) Antonio Gramsci and The Frankfurt School,
G) The New York Intellectuals,
H) The New Deal.
And ALL of "it"has been exploited by the New World Orderists who profit immensely by keeping us at each other's throats over relatively trivial matters, while they plunder the world's coffers and grab ever tighter Central Control of our lives.
"Power is the greatest aphrodisiac."
"Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order [referring to the 1991 LA Riot].
Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there were an outside threat from beyond [i.e False Flag or 911], whether real or “promulgated,” that threatened our very existence.
It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown.
When presented with this *scenario*, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government."
- Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991
WAKE UP! You are fencing with the feathers, and not even trying to get to the HEART of the bird you wish to kill.
~ FreeThinke
Here's a little reality to go with Jersey's fantasy comments...
http://www.mainstreet.com/article/moneyinvesting/taxes/most-americans-want-higher-taxes-rich
It has a pretty good summary of the subjects Jersey touches on, only this article is grounded in reality. Here's the kicker:
But as much as Americans seem willing to tax the wealthy to bring the country’s finances in line, most are against having their own taxes go up.
And in other news, the overwhelming majority of Americans want...
... To gorge themselves on beer, pizza, ice cream and chocolate but not gain weight
... A fabulous beach-ready physique without sweating in a gym to get it
... Drive really fast and not get a ticket
... To be rich, only much less are willing to work for it
This is why liberals hate the tea party. The tea partiers are the adults in the room telling the whiny children they can't have all the toys a chocolate they want.
The progressives will never retreat, they live for making trouble.
The progressives won't stop until they force everyone to take the "blue pill" and live in an Utopian Matrix.
Give me the "red pill" I like living in reality.
This is why liberals hate the tea party. The tea partiers are the adults in the room telling the whiny children they can't have all the toys a chocolate they want.
Hear, hear. There's a lot to be said about liberals and the thinking patterns of children.
They have no concept of private property, unless it is their own. What is thine is mine, it seems. Of course, they sex it up under "the common good", or "you have too much", ect. It's not stealing if a bureaucracy does the stealing, right?
Products of our Government School System.
Remember the Ozone Hole of the 1980's? How this was going to let in raw solar ultraviolet which was going to cook us alive?
Gee, what happened to that global disaster? Nothing, except a lot of useless federal regulation of cooling systems.
-------
Actually that's a pantload. The statist infringement of your rights to be a destructive child with nothing but an uncontrolled id was successful in managing the ozone hole.
Hopium, I like it !
Ducky: Please don't tell us you actually believe government bureaucracy successfully "managed" the ozone hole. What did they do go down to Antarctica and tell all those penguins to stop using aerosol hairspray?
But I do agree with you that the whole environmental alarmist shtick is a pantload...
Ducky said:
The statist infringement of your rights to be a destructive child with nothing but an uncontrolled id was successful in managing the ozone hole.
Now hold on there, pilgrim. Volcanoes and sea evaporation produce 86,000X as much chlorine as man made CFCs. I refuse to believe the Statist EPA saved our hides by foisting Freon substitutes on us. Perhaps they reduced the ozone hole by 1/86,000th. Good work.
Silver: do you remember the paintball gun I crafted at Holloman in 1990 that used (gasp old-syle Freon? A backpack worth of it at a time. Man, that thing was a blast to fire!
Now there are industries that do need to be regulated - like nuclear. If our government and GE didn't push a flawed design on Japan, Northern Japan might still be habitable. I'm just not into the crisis d'jure like the ozone hole.
Wasn't that the paintball gun that could put a hole through 1/4 inch plywood?
We took it out and used a paintball chrono - some 100 fps faster than your usual paintgun. Yeah!
The first iteration used a battery powered compressor in a backpack... nothing like having that thing buzzing around the paintball field.
Then I discovered Freon. Wish I had kept some of the cylinders of it, must be worth a fortune now.
Which is a good investment strategy - things the government wants to banish, stock up on for later. Like incandescent light bulbs. Or real 3 gallon per flush toilets.
Rand Paul recently excoriated an EPA bureaucrat about his pathetic 1.6 GPF toilets. The soviet EPA commissar was speechless. Freedom? What dat?
Farnham, don't get folksy, it makes it sounds as if you're from Texass.
The volcano data doesn't mean squat. Yes there are volumes of gases expelled into the atmosphere but IN COMBINATION with auto emissions and so forth the amount may so high that the change is more extreme and the recovery more difficult.
It's a complicated science. Much of what is being said on both sides is utter crap and some of the biggest critics are hard leftists like Eric Alterman.
But you do accomplish nothing when you patronize with a cheap rabies radio talking point.
Careful, Ducky. Hugh is a patent-holding scientist who actually works with chemicals. I won't say more because I don't want to blow his cover.
Ducky:
Didn't mean to patronize. I'm proud you assume I'm from Texass. I live in an even more hickish state with more oil wells and cattle than people.
You do bring up a good point:
It's a complicated science. Much of what is being said on both sides is utter crap and some of the biggest critics are hard leftists like Eric Alterman.
Two points:
1) Complicated science means many iterations of peer review before jumping on any regulatory bandwagon.
2) In a problem where the competing influence is orders of magnitude larger than the one you are looking at (CFCs) I pretty much call it done and move on. The vastly larger influence wins out. I understand the claim CFCs are more like catalysts compared to "normal" chlorine compounds.
I'm passionate about this issue since I recently purchased an expensive set of chiller compressors, only to find out that this model year the manufacturers were forced by the EPA to use a new refrigerant and compressor system. My tech could not modify the system due to the changes. I was pissed, to put it kindly.
Lisa,
"Talk to any business owner and the main thing holding them back,other than demand,is Obamacare,Dodd Frank,the EPA(Cap and Trade) and Obama and the democrats in general."
Bullshit.
Talk to the vast majority of business owners and they'd tell you none of that matters.
"Talk to people and the ones who need Universal Health care now are those losing their jobs,thanks to all the above."
Most of them know better and do not agree with that at all.
"What good is free health care when people have no jobs to pay for rent,food,heating,gas for their cars and electric."
It would seem to me to be tha=e most valuable thing they'd have at that point!
"Too bad it took them 3 years to find out what the "teabaggers" already knew."
The Tea People are among the most unpopular groups in America.
"What we could use is an economy that can sustain the democrats' big government wet dream."
Ya' know, even though you seem to think it's a terrible thing, and in some ways you're quite right about that, yes. YES. We need THAT economy (preferably not too establishment Dem, though, because that's just GOP Lite).
JMJ
jmj - Most Americans want higher taxes you say.
Well, my conversations with real live people who actually are desirous of having the liberty to lead a good life don't seem to fit your claim.
Guess it is just your high brow sanctimonious progressive crowd ur speaking of.
Go figure...
"Volcanoes and sea evaporation produce 86,000X as much chlorine as man made CFCs."
Ozone is vulnerable to CFCs specifically (not chlorine in general) delivered to the stratosphere. I'm not aware of any clear evidence that volcanoes emit any significant quantity of CFCs. I'm not a geologist, although I do take a general interest and if something as surprising as that were true, I probably would have noticed.
AFAIK the montreal protecol is still considered a very good example of international cooperation producing measurable positive environmental outcomes. As such, it dispatches some of the more ludicrous anti-environmentalist arguments that we still sometimes hear (eg. "man is too impotent to affect global climate" etc.)
Jersey McJones said...
"The Tea People are among the most unpopular groups in America."
I would say that privileged group would be the people that voted for Barack Hussein Obama.
The liberal media is forsaking their Messiah even now. If that, in and of itself, is not proof that the worm has turned for Mr. Obama, I don't know what else is.
The Emperor has no clothes. America knew tis all along, but it is the whining mouthpieces of his cheerleading squad who won't tell the truth.
But...some are beginning to.
Solyndra, al-Awlaki...these issues are bringing too much spotlight onto Mr. Obama, and he ain't liking it.
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