At CPAC--Glenn Beck to America: you must fight back, oppressives won't give up

Also...awards to global warming debunker and Hollywood/ACORN nemesis

By Wes Vernon

"They won't give up," and neither should you.

That warning was sounded by Glenn Beck, as he rallied the pro-American troops to do battle with the "they" who would undermine the land we love.

With his trademark passion for America's cause, the ultra-popular Fox News commentator alluded to the oppressives who would drag America to ruin with crushing energy taxes as they put the heavy hand of government between you and your doctor on health "care" — sinking us hopelessly further in debt.

Beck derisively says "they" are "progressives," a name which domestic leftists themselves have resurrected to re-package the popularly scorned "L" word — liberalism. This column prefers a slight adjustment to the "progressive" sound — with the word "oppressives." Yes, and we would apply that moniker to Woodrow Wilson — a prime object of Beck's nightly scorn.

A call to (political) arms

Glenn Beck's outspoken courage is matched by Fox News's steadfast determination (and media smarts) to back him up in turning back threats and boycotts of advertisers. The network's rich reward is a ratings card that outflanks all competition.

Speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) during the past weekend, Beck sounded the rallying cry to a record 10,000-plus attendees — conservatives of all stripes. He did not try to prettify the daunting challenge facing America in one of her darkest hours, but he plunged forward with a faith that in the end, American courage will win out — a "can do" attitude inspired by the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution whose Bill of Rights — he mentioned to the full-throated approval of the crowd — are endowed by God.

Here is the Glenn Beck challenge:

"Now, you know this is as bad as I want it to get. But if we don't stand up now and recognize it, it's going to get much, much, much worse.

"All we have to do is recognize the problem that we have, admit to our mistakes. Admit to our mistakes, do the hard work. It may be a hard day. We may have been all night wrenching — holding on to that home — because we went out for a party.

"And it may be a hard day and a hard struggle, and we may work 'til late in the night — and our kids may be crying, and we may be losing our house.

"We are going to go through some tough times, and we are going to be tired as we set things straight. It is a hard road. I know, I have walked it myself. (Beck, a recovering alcoholic, sees that experience as a metaphor for the huge challenge of the debt confronting America's children and grandchildren.)

"It is a hard road, but we will make it, and at night — we will be beat tired, we will be so tired....But when we put our head down on our pillow to go to sleep again that night, we can be happy because we know tomorrow, it will again be morning in America."

The AIM Awards

Among the participating organizations at CPAC was Accuracy in Media (AIM) — whose awards ceremony your servant was honored to emcee.

This year's honorees were author/columnist Andrew Breitbart — scourge of the Holly Left and ACORN — and Marc Morano — creator and editor of Climate Depot.

Since its founding, AIM has been doing much of the investigative journalism that the mainstream media refuse to do. Its founder — the late Reed Irvine — called the big news outlets out on their errors. Beyond that, Reed understood there was more than one way to lie to the American people.

The most blatant method, of course, is the outright false statement. The second — and often more frustrating — is simply ignoring a story that does not dovetail with the editor-publisher-reporter's prejudices. It is the latter kind of lying that Reed Irvine doggedly pursued in his media critiques. So when he caught the media ignoring a good story, Reed would do the shoe-leather work himself and publish his findings in the AIM Report. Examples include the strange death of Clinton friend and White House lawyer Vince Foster and the mysterious object that hit the downed Flight 800 — just off the coast of Long Island — witnessed by hundreds, but not pursued by the mainstream media (MSM).

More recently

Andrew Breitbart received his award for the lead role in the undercover expose of ACORN's willingness to provide advice to two of Breitbart's protégés — young people posing as a prostitute and her pimp — who caught ACORN workers on camera offering helpful tax avoidance advice as to how to dodge legal bullets in bringing under-age prostitutes over the border.

Breitbart tried to interest the MSM in his story. He went to ABC, and a producer watched the undercover film, but said alas, there was concern that "the politics" of the expose would not make it past the cutting room floor.

Marc Morano — the other AIM awardee — has a great nose for news that has enabled him to zip right past the media's inattention or hostility on the issue of Global Warming. After serving honorably and effectively in the office of Senator James Inhofe — the Senate's leading light on exposure of the "climate change" fraud — Morano struck out on his own with Climate Depot. If you go to his website, you will see for yourself that there is so much "warming" fakery out there that he has a fulltime job exposing it.

Back in the nineties, Morano was Rush Limbaugh's "man in Washington." Thugs at the Clinton White House seized his camera equipment the moment they heard he was on Rush's payroll. To her credit, the press corps' liberal grand dame Helen Thomas escorted Morano to the White House brass and successfully demanded that Morano's belongings be returned to him.

Speaking of "global warming"

Back in 1990-1991, the late, great economist Warren Brookes was writing newspaper columns lambasting what he spotted — even then — as a global warming hoax. In fact, it was through him that many of us first focused attention on that phenomenon.

Brookes left us prematurely, but not before expressing outrage that the climate-measuring stations were disproportionately located in or near urban centers of the world and thus tipping the scales in such a way as to cause the world's temperatures to trend toward a warmer record than would be the case if they were also evenly distributed throughout the rural countryside locations, which would pull the average temperature readings downward toward the cool side. In fact, he noted that countryside weather stations were being removed.

Bingo! Vindication for Brookes

All of that was about two decades before Joseph D'Aleo — the first director of meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel — and Anthony Watts — a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org — released a recent study verifying Brookes' long-ago writings.

On January 29 of this year, Messrs. D'Aleo and Watts submitted what the Washington Times defines as a "startling" report. Its thrust is that — sure enough — starting in 1990, about the time Brookes was telling his readers about it, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began "systematically eliminating climate-measuring stations in cooler locations around the world."

One need not be a math whiz to understand that removing weather stations from cooler locations tends to drive up the overall averages. Voila! "Global Warming!" Head for the hills!

Coincidence?

This column has no hard and fast evidence that the removal of the weather stations was done with the purpose in mind of skewing the readings so as to make it all the easier to perpetrate the greatest fraud of the late 20th and early 21st centuries — i.e., man-made global warming. We do not traffic in "conspiracy theories" unless there really are — well — provable conspiracies. Still it would be nice to know exactly what prompted the decision to reduce temperature-reading stations from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

What happened there? Did a budget-crunch lead to an effort to cut back on the commutes of some NOAA people by confining most of the stations in more densely-populated centers? Or what?

Further, we are informed that researchers are "puzzled" by the fact that land-based temperatures have trended upward, while satellites have not shown similar trends since — guess when? — 1990. Interesting that. It would perhaps be explained by the wholesale removal of the number of weather stations. You tell me. I'm just the messenger.

Climategate: Not going away

Two years ago, Christopher Horner — like the late Brookes associated with the indispensible Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) — wrote that the perpetrators of the Global Warming hoax have ways of dealing with dissenters who did not sing in their choir.

In his 2008 book Red Hot Lies, Horner — a Senior Fellow at CEI — wrote that the high priests of "climate change" "[tried to] ruin careers, blacklisted scientists, knowingly spread lies about dissenters, called for the imprisonment of skeptics, and used government pressure to cut off rivals' funding. One scientist found the lug nuts on his wheels secretly loosened when he publicly voiced his rejection of climate orthodoxy." (What goes around comes around as today the very wheels are coming off the global warming fraud itself).

And all of this was revealed before the Climategate scandal broke in late 2009, when hacked e-mails exposed active affirmative phoneying up of science — by accredited scientists no less — and their efforts to suppress those in the profession who dared to question the bible of the Global Warming (GW) Church. (That terminology is not intended as an exaggeration. They don't call it that, but these people's attitude is suggestive of a secular-style religious fanaticism.)

Case in point

Horner, whose own garbage has been ransacked by the likes of Greenpeace in its effort to find something with which to smear him, cites an example of where the Climate Police have enlisted media cooperation in their mission of destruction.

When ABC set out to sandbag a scientist skeptical of the Holy G.W. Church, they sought out those whose cowardice impelled them to duck behind the cloak of anonymity to smear the dissenter. Horner nails them as "almost certainly" Stephen Schneider, whose idea of making a strong scholarly case for the global warming myth is to suggest "we need to tell scary stories"; Michael Oppenheimer — a pressure group activist; and Al Gore advisor James Hansen — who is prospering from global warming alarmism — possibly even beyond the big bucks raked in by "the Goracle himself." (In case you haven't noticed, there's big money in "global warming.")

From across the pond

The British press has often been more astute at ferreting out scandals than our own media.

Kudos to Jonathan Petre of the London Daily Mail, who made the front page with damning confessions in a BBC interview with climate alarmist scientist Phil Jones — a leading figure in the Climategate scandal.

In that discussion, Jones admitted that (1) the data vital for the "hockey stick" has gone missing — the very underpinning for global warming theories; (2) there has been no statistical global warming since 1995; and (3) warming periods have happened before — but long before heavy industrialization and not due to man-made changes.

Add to this the following: (1) the UN's top climate change czar — Yvo de Boer — has resigned, apparently discouraged that global warming has demonstrated its fraudulence during his tenure; (2) some of the states, notably Arizona and Utah, have backed off or are about to abstain from participating in the anticipated Western Climate Initiative; and (3) BP, Caterpillar, and Conoco-Phillips have told the U.S. Climate Partnership — "We're outta here" — or words to that effect. This is or was an effort to lend industry muscle to the effort to saddle us with "cap and trade" energy taxes.

And of course, there was the collapse of the Copenhagen climate "summit." President Obama showed up there during blustery winter weather, and flew back to Washington to be greeted by yet another snowstorm (causing one editorialist to note that "God has a sense of humor").

Conclusions

We could go on, but we're out of space in pinpointing the many signs of hope that the oppressives are losing the credibility with which they intend to ride to victory in the effort to destroy this country through confiscatory spending, over-regulation, and taxation — all in the name of the G.W. Church.

We're no doubt going to experience that long night and "long hard road" of which Glenn Beck warns, and it may be as wrenching as he predicts. But the way things are going right now — someone has the wind to our backs.

Oh, yes, and Reed Irvine today would have to be looking down with some pleasure at the "citizen media" that have exposed what was once an unstoppable MSM propaganda machine that came dangerously close to acting out a George Orwell novel.

In the fifties, sixties, and seventies and much of the eighties, that was a scandal. So much so that you have to believe that had it not involved the normally scandal-loving media, the media would have been all over it.

© Wes Vernon