Shhh! Don't tell AlGore!

You won't hear this on the news. You won't read about it on any of the left-wing blogs. But last week NASA--quietly, without public announcement or fanfare--readjusted their temperature data for the lower 48 states. And when they did, something strange happened. Come to find out, the warmest year on record was NOT 1998 as they had previously announced. It was 1934--some 30 or so years before the first SUV's that the greenies are blaming for all thsi "man-made" glo-bull warming. In fact, 4 out of the 10 hottest years occured not in the last dozen or so years, but in the 1930's!

So why does the left continue their bugaboo about humans--i.e., Americans--destroying the planet with our carbon emissions and SUV's and air conditioning? In his latest column, Mark Steyn explains it.

In my book, still available at all good bookstores (you can find it propping up the wonky rear leg of the display table for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"), I try to answer this question by way of some celebrated remarks by the acclaimed British novelist Margaret Drabble, speaking just after the liberation of Iraq. Miss Drabble said:

"I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win."

That's an interesting list of grievances. If you lived in Poland in the 1930s, you weren't worried about the Soviets' taste in soft drinks or sentimental Third Reich pop culture. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the U.S. is a threat to France or India or Chad or some such. But because it's the world's first nonimperial superpower the world has had to concoct a thesis that America is a threat not merely to this or that nation-state but to the entire planet, and not because of conventional great-power designs but because — even scarier — of its "consumption," its very way of life.

Those Cokes and cheeseburgers detested by discriminating London novelists are devastating the planet in ways that straightforward genocidal conquerors like Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of. The construct of this fantasy reveals how unthreatening America is.

In other words, the left has had to invent some cockamamie threat in their quest to hate America. We are a democracy (OK, technically a republic. Roll with me here), governed by laws that are ostensibly designed to protect law-abiding citizens from those with no respect for the rule of law. We are a country that the poor in this world look to and flock to for freedom and prosperity.

And liberals hate that. They would rather have us be a Communist state, with every aspect of your life being regulated by the State. Failing that, liberals would be glad to see the United States converted into a caliphate, with laws being crafted not by elected legislators, but by imperial, impetuous judges with no accountability to a constituency. A judiciocracy, if you will, that imposes its beliefs upon a population with no recourse to have them removed. The left knows that they cannot get their agenda legitimized through democratic (small 'd') channels, so they resort to the courtrooms and news media that are all too happy to support their cause and carry their water.

So, they come up with this "man-made global warming" nonsense to invent a threat that does not exist (unlike Islamic terrorism, which is very real) in order that they may gain sympathy with the people through propaganda, and legislate what you can and can't drive, eat, etc. Because if you are willing to give up those freedoms, then more important ones (religion, speech, etc) will be given up more easily. Don't believe me, look at this video from Britain.

(tracked at Stop the ACLU.)