Let’s Not Be Too Specific
Liberals are mavens at selecting causes that sound like Mama’s cooking but, upon closer examination, are blurred a wee bit, just enough to defy specificity. This suits them fine. Liberals resist exactitude because exactitude requires commitment and conviction, concepts odious to “progressives,” as they modestly label themselves. You can tell a liberal by the bruises and band-aids on his body — he “falls” for every smooth-sounding argument that a modern-day medicine man raises. The least serious but most enthusiastic arguments I have seen lately are made by a longtime columnist for the Long Beach Press Telegram. Even though he is Irish, Tom Hennessy is old enough to know better. Being Irish, he possesses a marvelous sense of humor. As a fellow Irishman, though from the more sensible wing, I can tell you Mr. Hennessy is politically tone deaf. It isn’t important to Mr. Hennessy to be right, only to oppose President Bush. Like all angry liberals, he has been chasing the ball of yarn called global warming back and forth across the living room carpet. He is not making gaining ground anymore than the pendulum on an old-fashioned grandfather clock gains ground. But progress is not why liberals are in business. It’s the cause, man, the cause. Everybody’s got to have a cause, liberals tell us.
One Definition, Please
In his essay in Thursday morning’s edition, Mr. Hennessy makes a wobbly attempt to buttress his sky-is-falling theory. Cleverly, he quotes selectively from an Associated Press commentary that moved last week. At the end, Mr. Hennessy leaps from his chair and cries out to his readers, “See there.” Pal, I saw the same story. Permit me to tell you what it really said. The Associated Press reported that it had contacted “more than 100 top climate researchers.” Ah, the old carny shell game. Mr. Hennessy shrewdly overlooked this detail because it would have dampened if not murdered his argument. More than 80 percent of the climate scientists — possibly more than 90 percent — testified they had neither read Al Gore’s global-warming primer, “An Inconvenient Truth,” nor seen his new film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” So the A.P. reporter turned to the 19 fellows who had either read the tome or seen the film. The reporter raved. By golly, what do you know? By another darned coincidence, all 19 said Mr. Gore was the cat’s pajamas. The end is near, they cheered in unison. We should pack our cars and flee to the nearest bunker to hide our families until a new scare can be thought up. Mr. Hennessy, naturally, based his contentions on the 19 smart guys, blowing off the overwhelming number who determined that Mr. Cause-a-Day Gore was not Moses in a business suit.
Postscript
It may be that Mr. Hennessy has a vague idea of what he is writing about but just has not yet deigned to share it with us peasants. Likelier, the gentleman is full of the same old hot air he and his fellow angry, angry liberals say is billowing through the earth, caused by businesses owned by sensible conservatives. Based on my regular reading of Mr. Hennessy’s essays and my knowledge of myself, neither of us is anymore capable than my dead dog of contextually defining global warming in a meaningful engineering sense. Intelligence on the subject prerhaps can be compressed into a succinct observation made yesterday by the Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson. “We don’t know enough to relieve global warming, and — barring major technological breakthroughs — we can’t do much about it.” If Mr. Hennessy and his fellow liberals will line up on my left, I will throw the ball of yarn back on the carpet. Chase it, boys.