Two lessons about moral cowardice learned from last night's House vote on Cap and Trade bill:

   1) Most Democrat congressmen (and eight Republicans) voted against their own best interests, and against their own constituents' will on a bill none had read and will deny all responsibility once the fine print is revealed, should it become law, in whole or in part. That is a kind of arrogance and cowardice we've all come to expect these past few years. We should not hold ourselves blameless in allowing things to have moved this far down the path to self-destruction.
      On these Yea-votes, the main reason they voted that way could be that Obama has promised them re-election, notwithstanding voter anger. Obama needs this legislation, so promises the ultimate kickback, and with one-party rule, repeat RULE, on the horizon; that's a swift kick.
      By crossing that line they have become aidders and abettors in the socialist/fascist conspiracy that is the Obama administration. They now ride in his boat...but with only one oarsman. If it should prove un-seaworthy and they find themselves adrift in fast, high muddy water in need of a lifeline, he will leave them for gator bait, just one of many lessons learned at Alinsky's teat.
      It may prove to be the most stupid vote Nancy Pelosi ever brought to the floor of that House on this account alone, if voter ire can prove more powerful than Acorn (and others') stealth and thuggery. If so, most of those 219 aye-votes, and a dozen or so "permitted" nay-votes, just for being in the same party, will find themselves back to hanging shingles in seventeen months.

   2) Notwithstanding the overwhelming GOP votes against it (with 8 turncoats), this vote was a culmination of over ten years of cowardice...repeat COWARDICE, by the GOP...by effectively ignoring a crime for over a decade, then screaming bloody murder when the punishment, to be levied against us, has been shown to be draconian and painful.
       Let me explain this more clearly, for already, the stalwart, nay-saying end of the GOP is getting kudos from Rush Limbaugh, among others, for standing up...way tardily and rather tepidly I might ad, and yelling "Ouch" last night when for at least a decade the proper cry should have been "Liar, Liar, pants on fire!"
      I was in state government when the major environmental legislation was first passed, Clean Air, Clear Water, EPA, 1968-1970. I was a movement environmentalist then, with something of a regional cachet. I was in the papers.
      By the Clinton Administration, 1993, air quality in this country had improved by 95%. Repeat, 95%! So much so that the environmental movement apparently had to come up with new problems to solve that would justify spending roughly ten times more money to reduce air pollution 1% more than the aggregate spending to reduce it the first 95% those first 20 years.
      The Global Warming Scam arose out of that need. In 1992 Rush Limbaugh had a famous debate/confrontation with Al Gore on ABC's Nightline, so we can use that as good a jumping off date as any. (We like to call Gore the Calvera, from The Magnificent Seven, of environmentalism, "If God had not intended them to be sheared, He would not have made them sheep.")
      Rush said it well enough, but in hindsight could have said it better, for Al Gore lied through his teeth and we'd all been better off had Rush said that, plainly, to Al Gore's (and the nation's) face.
      Let's break the lie down.
      The fact (or non-fact) of global warming exists at three levels: 1) Does it, or did it ever exist; 2) If it did, was it man-made, or an occurrence of nature, or both, and 3) Can Man do anything to alleviate it?
      Understand that last night's Cap and Trade bill was a legislative lip-service attempt to alleviate it, so was predicated on the assumption that Man, no, the United States, can alleviate global warming, no matter what its cause. This is not do-goodism, it a lie, and the liars know it.
      In the 1980s air pollution (remember the ozone layer and aerosol spray cans?) was forever associated with global warming, or "climate change" as it is called now, but no credit was ever laid at the feat of air quality improvements from the 1970s, for it is a lagging indicator of global temperatures. It is entirely plausible that improving air quality would eventually slow down, even stop rising temperatures from that giant shield of pollution covering the earth, but it would not be instantaneous. In fact, it took almost thirty years to stop it...if it actually did at all.
      Problem is, only about a third of the globe the US joined in this effort back then. Western Europe, Bermuda, and one Pacific atoll, that's about it. Visiting Russia for the first time in 1991 I was stunned at the dark cloud that hung over the Polish border and eastward, enduring all the way into Siberia (I'm told) and as far south as the Black Sea (I saw for myself). It was worse than anything I'd ever seen flying out of Pittsburgh in 1971. I spent a winter in Russia then, and never saw the sun once, and the snow was a coffin-colored grey...all the way to Gorki.
      That cloud has only now begun to dissipate, for still the sky darkens when one leaves the alpine airspace of Austria for Hungary and Serbia. Trucks with '57 Fiat engines, farm tractors, and old commie cars still chug along the highways, and factory smokestacks without scrubbers still belch smoke that could even curl Pelosi's false eyelashes. In Russia, rivers still run red with acid and toxic waste, where generally things are much worse than the Balkans. And in China and India, the air is getting worse, not better, for theirs are economies with boots still going up the stairs, not bedroom slippers coming down. (Paul Harvey) They have no intention of slowing down.
      So, while two thirds of the globe hasn't improved in terms of air quality, still mysteriously, around 1998 global air temperatures leveled off and have have even retreated some the past nine years. The world is getting cooler, not warmer. Did America do this?
      The point here is, the stated chief cause (air pollution) of a global warming that ceased almost warming ten years ago (1998) has been proved not to be the cause of global warming after all. So then, what is the cause?
      Well, there's cow flatulence, which, is "man-made", they say, because there wouldn't be so many of them if we didn't raise them to eat. If we were all vegans there might be just enough cattle to fit into all the state-run zoos in the world, putting PETA in the uneasy predicament of actually favoring killing off all the cattle in the world just to keep us from eating a few of them at a time as renewable resources. (Now there's a life-is-a-precious-thing policy I can chow down on!)
      And now there's carbon, which composes about 19% of the human body, and so much of the atmosphere that every time we breathe in oxygen we "breathe out" carbon dioxide, which plants then breathe in so as to breathe oxygen back out, thus completing the cycle. Stunning in its simplicity, eh? I learned that in eighth grade. Congress still hasn't for that is exactly what Congress wants to tax in order to alleviate global warming. Maybe eighth grade ain't what it used to be, but Obama actually said all that crap with a straight face, so I assume he was serious.
     And what do we do about all those people who, from 1960 into 2000, or maybe last week, who told us that air pollution, American air pollution, was the main cause of global warming? What do we do with scientists who are wrong? Who didn't read the tea leaves correctly. Who fudge the numbers, jimmy the system, feed the models with made-up stuff? Who lie? And what do we do ("should be do" is more appropriate) about the politicians and bureaucrats who egg them, and have lured them into this life of scientific apostasy and sin with money, power and fleeting prestige?
     On the issue whether global warming exists now, or ever existed in the past thirty years, there is a majority of scientists who agree it did exist. Around 65% I'm told, but certainly not a consensus, as Henry Waxman allows. But when it comes down to "does it exist now?", that number falls below 50%, for even the most politicized of scientists can't deny the fact that global temperatures have been dropping for nearly a decade. They just simply have to find ways to spin the fact in such a way they can continue to get grant money, which means keeping the political "discussion" (Obama's favorite metaphor for shooting people who disagree with you, as in Iran) moving forward.
     And as we've found out, over the years there has been a lot of scientific cheating going on, such as placing thermometers next to the tailpipe of  '51 Studebakers rather than hanging them in a pine tree in the forest to get a clearer sense of real temperatures. (Computer modeling "scientists" are not like real scientists in that they really don't like having to trudge out into nature to check those things every day. It's more preferred to stop off in an alleyway on the way home from Moe's after a few drams of Guiness.)
     For the longest time, because we believed science was incorruptible and never cheated, no one really double-checked these processes. Now we do.
     At no time was there ever a consensus in the scientific community that global warming is a fact. You don't have consensus until you get into the 90%-95% range of agreement. There is more of a consensus that Al Gore is a fool than his own opinions about global warming.
     So then, let's look at whether global warming, if it existed at all, was man-made. Here the numbers fall into the 25% range, which is a minority, and nothing like a consensus, unless we're only counting left-leaning scientists with no neck.
     From everything from cow farts in Africa to termites in the Brazilian forests, from sunspots to minor variations in the way the world spins on its axis, all natural causes, we've had to come to the conclusion that Man, tops, is responsible for maybe 10%-15% of the world's pollution...and worse, in trying to answer the question whether Man can do anything about it, we have to draw the conclusion that the United States and Europe, even if we returned to an aboriginal state, could only effect about 1% of it...for nothing we do will stop China and India from burning just about everything, Indian brahmas and Masai longhorn from lifting their tails and tooting, Brazilian termites from exhaling as they chew, or that lucky old sun, from still doing what he's always been doing.
     Think about it, we reduced air pollution in the US by 95% between 1970 and 1990, yet worldwide pollution didn't drop more than a degree.
      So let's indict the analysts instead of the users or producers of energy. After all, the people who said air pollution was the major cause of a non-existent global condition (and they were wrong times two) are now telling us it wasn't really air pollution after all but other things that are the real problem, but we should now (keep on) believing them because they are being really diligent in updating old news, even though most of these same folks were telling us in the 70s and 80s that global cooling and new ice age (remember Carl Sagan?), not warming, would be our next environmental catastrophe?
     Yes, I know things would be much better if we resorted to the old biblical practice of throwing prophets over cliffs once they'd proven to be wrong more than once. I'm about to revisit that whole theme, in fact. I have pictures of Mussolini and his lady-friend dancing in my head right now.
     But first, as Shakespeare said, we have to shoot the liars. Well, that's not exactly what Will said, but he was in the ballpark.
     You see, the global warming hoax has been moved along as a long, oft repeated, and easy-to-believe lie. Actually, up and down the political and scientific ladder, more than one lie. And the biggest lie of all was known, "out there" as they say in the press, since Al Gore wrote his first book.

     Last year we opened a website, GreatAmericanZeroes.com where we hoped to hang liars. It hasn't gone very far because, in part, we couldn't keep up with the lies with our small staff. But I wrote an opening essay on the nature of lying, which you may want to look at, as reminder of the types of lies out there.
    Consider lying for a moment. We all know the lie when someone states a thing to be so when he knows it not to be so. That is the ordinary, "Mommy, I didn't take a cookie from the cookie jar" lie. It's the kind of lie that not only Bill Clinton, but any cheating, lying husband would tell his wife when he came home from a business trip with gray slacks with side zipper in his bag instead of his big boy, fly-in-the-front Robert Halls he left with. You know, the think-fast, CYA lie.
    Now, it took awhile to believe Science would engage in that sort of lie, the eye-bulging whopper, in part, because of the peer review system and the Scientific Method, not to mention a rigorous kind of ethics in science lawyers only talk about (and insist on in others in court) but never seem to be able to summon in themselves. But then again, no one ever really considered statistical modeling to be a science, no more than it was a math. Statistical analysis is math every bit as much as Madonna is blond.
    As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and Democr...er, nope, Statistics. Statistics was always the brothel where Science and Politics meet on Saturday night in a sleazy hotel just off Baltimore Street. Their off-spring are many...and every one's name begins with "B".
    So, as we're learning, now that we're able to track down some of those little B-is-for-bastards, B-is-for-Bureaucrats, in the global warming presentations over the years, it's stunning just how many of them are lies...falsified studies, reports, skewed result, etc...and most served as the bulwark of the early studies that buttressed global warming theories, especially as input for computer models.
    But still, the far greater lie, and the one Rush Limbaugh allowed to pass with Al Gore back in1992, was the most notorious of lies, and that is when we insist a thing is a fact and 1) we know we can't prove it. At that point it has to be a faith (a religion) or a lie, only a faith can't be disproved either. (I've just given you a short course in the mathematics of lying, by the way.)
    That is the Viral Lie, a lie that would have a life expectancy of less than a minute in ordinary social intercourse, yet is found everywhere in politics...and the courtroom. In both, it is a lie of conscience, a lie of vanity. And today it's catching.
    Now these kinds of lies have for years been associated with the political arena, but when it insinuates itself into the science (also medicine) community, with the seeming "approval" of the Scientific Method, then our entire civilization is at risk, which is a much greater threat than anything a little dirty air can bring about.
    There's a Pulitzer Prize out there for someone who wants to track these Class B lies throughout the global warming debate. And while you're at it, look into second hand smoke, which has already transferred billions from the private to the public sector. For it is the same model, the same scam.

     I'll bet you thought this was going to be a rant about these lies and liars.
     No, it's about those who abide the lies, and a quick inquiry into why allegedly smart people do indeed indulge such lies in others...when it is their sworn duty to resists them.
     The lie of global warming has been out there, growing more twisted for over 16 years, yet, Republicans, most of whom are lawyers, and who are supposed to have at least passed the required Evidence courses and know something of hearsay, primary evidence, secondary sources, what's admissible and what's not, allowed these things to pass without comment for sixteen years!.
     The question becomes, do they, as lawyers or congresspersons, really know anything about lying then? Did they just see all these lies as "evidence" being proffered up by one side of the argument, and when, upon looking around found no one to rebut it, just let it ride? Did they forget that in the adversarial courtroom called Congress it was their duty, their sworn duty, to do the rebutting in the first place?
     Last night's vote was a culmination of twelve years, and yes, I'm including that sainted class of '94, of sitting idly by while a lie as big as Clinton's ego was being floated under the noses of their own constituents, without some much as a "by your leave" in rebuttal.
     You didn't have to be an environmental expert to see this in the plainest of terms. The Enviro-lobby, Al Gore, the entire Democrat party passed whoppers around that a third grader could have spotted. My sons knew how to spot that kind of lie by the time they were twelve.
     So, when the big vote came up last night all Boehner & Co could carp about was tax increases and lost jobs and the general unfairness of having to vote on a law that hadn't even been writ yet. My suggestion; instead of trying to indict a fellow for a tax injustice, why not hang the sumbitch for telling dastardly lies?
     High taxes and lost jobs are not the crime here, they are the punishment, our punishment, not yours, Congressman. The crimes were the lies, the damned lies and statistics we hired you Casper Milquetoasts to expose.
    You didn't just fail. You chickened out....not yesterday, but years ago, sinking a little deeper with each passing year of not calling down thunder on this lie. That's a hook Marxists have used since the 1930s...once you run a dirty smell under a fellow's nose once or twice, and for whatever reason, he doesn't cry "Fart"...he's forever barred from crying "Fart" without losing face, for having missed it the first time. This failure (actually it's an attempt to appear cool) is a vanity just as big as the Al Gore vanity of saying a thing to be so he cannot possibly know to be so...and the Left plays that vanity like a Stradivarius, for it is all build on cowardice.
     The Dems have known they owned the House GOP for 16 years. Always did. Smartest people in the district, my sister's black cat's arse. They're cowards and you can pile all the J.D.'s in Congress on top of another and you still can't build a single spine. Bill Buckley was right, we'd do better by electing Arnie Aardvark out of the phone book to their seat...just anyone with enough sense to spot a confidence man and a pair big big enough to call him on it..
   
      Now you know where I stand. I started this essay out trying to be analytical and now am mad as hell. I need a beer. No, three.
      To hell with just coughing up that chronic whine about lost jobs, taxes and all the other GOP nostrums. These are liars, even criminals, (since that's what liars become when you indulge them long enough) and even if it cost your jobs (it probably will anyway, count on it) stand up and say so. All you have to lose is your job and all you have to gain is your self-respect.
Vassar Bushmills