Back in 2007, we first highlighted the essay that ran in Editor and Publisher, old media’s house organ titled, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.” Of course, as we’ve seen in the years since, there isn’t much objectivity left for old media to get over.

Evidently the Politico has taken their advice, as Mark Hertsgaard, who identifies himself on camera as working for that increasingly left-leaning and formerly JournoList-affiliated Website badgers Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK). As Inhofe’s YouTube page notes, “Global warming alarmists led by Mark Hertsgaard attempted to ambush Senator Inhofe following a hearing this morning. See for yourself who ended up winning the argument.”

But simply by being online, Hertsgaard has lost part of the argument. Take a look at Hertsgaard’s latest essay at the Politico:

Will it take the Republican Party as long to accept modern science as it took the Roman Catholic Church? The church waited 359 years to admit Galileo was right — the earth does move around the sun. Not until 1992 did the Vatican officially withdraw its condemnation of the man Albert Einstein called the father of modern science.

Today, even children know that the earth revolves around the sun. But that idea was heresy to the 17th-century church. When Galileo would not abandon his views, the Inquisition put him on trial in 1633. He was forced to recant under penalty of death, then lived under house arrest for the rest of his life.

But now who’s being geocentric, Kay?

At the Tatler, Bryan Preston adds:

Unpack that a bit and you have fallacious appeals to authority, followed by ad hominem attacks and insults. That’s not science, though having worked around more than a few scientists in my time, it’s unfortunately not uncommon behavior for scientists to engage in. Hertsgaard never deals honestly with the ClimateGate emails, which provide extremely strong evidence that the scientists at the heart of the debate were and still are cooking the books. It’s as if “hide the decline” never entered the debate. It’s as if none of the pile of information showing real and widespread fraud done in the name of global warming alarmism never happened at all.

That’s what I call living in denial.

Here’s Hertsgaard’s ambush interview with Inhofe:

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But if Hertsgaard is serious about his language and his eco-apocalypticism, to paraphrase Instapundit, I’d be more likely to believe there’s a crisis when he starts to act like there’s a crisis. That means setting an example and getting off the Internet, to cut down on electricity and air-conditioned server room use. Hertsgaard is based in San Francisco; how did he get to DC? Think of the polar bears, man! And additionally, to borrow from Ann Althouse, the following rules should be observed by journalists who take global warming seriously:

3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don’t run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.

4. Get up at sunrise. Don’t waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.

5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don’t have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.

Also, the iPod that Hertsgaard carries in his ambush interview with Inhofe is right out as well, given its use of the Internet and petroleum-based byproducts to manufacture it. And note the obligatory use of children as human shields. Nothing like telling a young girl that her future is completely hosed. Near the end of the video, Hertsgaard “salutes” Inhofe for having plenty of children and grandkids — but doesn’t that contradict the global warming alarmists’ fear that large families cause global warming?

But then, what doesn’t.

In contrast to Hertsgaard, this is a man who takes his climate change and the transportation requirements it imposes upon on hairshirt true believers seriously.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Tim Blair notes:

The European Union’s energy commissioner Gunter Oettinger points out something so basic and true that it routinely eludes our political-environmental superiors:

We need industry in Europe, we need industry in the U.K., and industry means CO2 emissions.

Of course, to our greener pals the premise of that argument – “we need industry” – is false.

Just ask the JournoList’s favorite president.

Related: “Today, six years ago, the Kyoto Protocols, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, came into force. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that no country has followed its commitment. That’s good, but also a cautionary tale about the validity of international agreements built on unicorns and pixie dust.”

Update: It gets better: “CANCELED: HOT—Mark Hertsgaard in Conversation with NASA’s James Hansen — Due to snow storms in New York City, this event has been canceled.  Please check back again for a new date and time.”

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…How?

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The past two winters have dumped plenty of snow on the east coast, making hash of such claims from a decade ago that  “Sledding and snowball fights are as out-of-date as hoop-rolling,” as the New York Times sniffed in January of 2000. And yet, the relentless march to banish incandescent lights to fight the imagined effects of global warming marches on. Often with unintended consequences, as this Philadelphia Daily News report highlights:

Going green has caused some Philadelphians, including City Councilman Frank Rizzo, to see white.

“The new LED traffic-bulb lights were completely coated by snow and ice, preventing drivers from seeing the signal,” Rizzo said about his commute to work Thursday.

Although energy-efficient and cost-effective, LED lights have a downside. The LED bulbs burn cooler than the old incandescent lights, meaning snow that covers them melts slower, said Mark McDonald, Mayor Nutter’s spokesman.

Naturally, the unnecessary replacement of incandescents puts more local government employees to work:

Other cities that are prospering with LED traffic lights have adapted to some of the new technology’s imperfections.

In Milwaukee, the city purchased long poles and brushes to manually clean the lights, according to the city’s chief traffic and street-lighting engineer, Bob Bryson. Cops and snow-removal trucks report covered lights.

In Denver, workers use air compressors and long brushes to clear snow-covered traffic lights. Denver also monitors most of its lights from a traffic control room.

Also in snow-related tri-state news, pickle juice is being used to melt snow in cash-strapped Bergen County, New Jersey because it’s much cheaper than salt. But then Philadelphia Eagles fans know that there’s nothing pickle juice can’t do.

Related: Meanwhile, back in the much warmer climate of northern California,”Solyndra Solar Panel plant in Fremont, California has wasted a billion dollars, $535 million of those a direct bailout from U.S. taxpayers, and it is going ‘bust.’” But it continues to be a useful campaign backdrop for green-obsessed Democrat politicians such as Barbara Boxer and President Obama.

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We kick off another year of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog with a look at Old Media’s response to the horrific shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). For anyone who was on Twitter at the time the news first broke, it was quite a sight watching old media’s narrative emerge in real time even before any of the basic facts of the story were known.

But this was far from the first time that a narrative was preformed—or very quickly assembled in the wake of a shock event.  We try to place the MSM’s response to the Giffords shooting with some earlier attempts by the MSM to force the facts like a pretzel to fit an existing storyline:

• Krugman versus the clip-art.
• Camelot and the Prefab Narrative.
• Katrina: Iraq without Iraq.
• Airbrushing Rev. Wright out of the media.
• “N-Word 15 times.”
• Katie and Mayor Mike go looking for the Times Square Bomber in all the wrong places.
• “To be fair, there were some good reasons to steer the coverage initially in this direction.”

Tune in here to watch:

A handy portable, easily embeddable YouTube format of the video is also available. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti.

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“Sledding and snowball fights are as out-of-date as hoop-rolling,” the New York Times sniffed in January of 2000:

Dr Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund was interviewed by the New York times in January 2000 as part of an article on the recent run of mild winters. As the article, which was about the ‘absence of snow’ in New York, reported:

Dr. Oppenheimer, among other ecologists, points to global warming as perhaps the most significant long-term factor.

Oppenheimer even had a tear-jerking personal angle on the ‘absence of snow’ in modern winters. The New York Times writer mournfully announced that snow-balls fights are now as outdated as hoop-rolling, and quoted Oppenheimer on the pathetic spectacle of the unused sled in his stairwell, symbol of a warming world:

But it does not take a scientist to size up the effects of snowless winters on the children too young to remember the record-setting blizzards of 1996. For them, the pleasures of sledding and snowball fights are as out-of-date as hoop-rolling, and the delight of a snow day off from school is unknown.

‘I bought a sled in ’96 for my daughter,” said Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a scientist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. ”It’s been sitting in the stairwell, and hasn’t been used. I used to go sledding all the time. It’s one of my most vivid and pleasant memories as a kid, hauling the sled out to Cunningham Park in Queens.”

Uploaded to YouTube on January 1st, 2011: Skiing on Park Avenue:

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I blame global warming.

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“Criminal investigations are under way to find out why it took so long to dig out from last week’s massive snow storm,” New York’s CBS affiliate reports:

Videos released exclusively to CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer suggest that the clean-up job may have been dirtier than once thought.

One video is now in the hands of prosecutors. It shows two sanitation trucks driving down 155th Street in the Whitestone section of Queens after the blizzard without removing the snow.

Their plows were apparently raised and the snow was left untouched in their wake, apparent proof that some in the Sanitation Department engineered a work slowdown.

“[It’s a] tremendous shock,” said NYC Councilman Daniel Halloran, R-Queens.

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“It was Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s greatest mayor ever, who said there is no Democratic or Republican way to pick up Gotham’s garbage,” Bob McManus writes in the New York Post:

Which, in case you haven’t noticed, hasn’t been collected for more than a week now — the current mayor having been brought low by a snowstorm in December.

What would the Little Flower have thought?

First, that his successor-nine-times-removed has been spending far too much time on ephemera — lately, the alleged evils of political partisanship — and not nearly enough on the basics of municipal governance.

And, as a result, he got his pants pulled down by a gaggle of mutinous garbagemen.

Correct on both counts.

La Guardia’s maxim spoke to attention to basics: While there necessarily must be partisanship in government, it rarely has much to do with the delivery of essential services. Keep the fundamentals under control and folks will overlook a lot.

But when a mayoralty comes to be defined by fanciful notions — political labels, bike paths, french fries and other irrelevancies — forgiveness following catastrophe will be a long time coming.

Especially when the mayor’s reaction to the debacle ranges from surly condescension to bewildered resentment to transparently feigned contrition.

Actually, there’s scant evidence that Mike Bloomberg even now knows what hit him — apart from 20-plus inches of snow, of course.

And the sanitation slowdown. Wildcat strike would be too strong a term — wild kitten, maybe. But, still, the mayor couldn’t cope. The truth is that while Mike Bloomberg was off trash talking Democratic/Republican rancor, he lost control of the New York City Department of Sanitation.

And of course, you know there is no way whatsoever that Bloomberg would take a page from the Gipper or Silent Cal’s playbook to deal with this issue:

Ronald Reagan had a philosophy. He also knew how to create a climate. In the first moments of his administration, Ronald Reagan was presented with striking air-traffic controllers who wanted an unbelievably unrealistic wage and benefit increase. The New York Times (!) said in an editorial at the time, “the Reagan Administration has little choice but to risk the walkout and seek help from the courts. For a settlement on the union’s exorbitant terms would set an inflationary precedent for millions of Federal employees.”Of course, the risks were worse than the Times‘s own assessment. And, the Times overlooked an option. Reagan could can their sorry asses. And that is precisely what he did. Reagan fired the strikers, risking a grinding halt to America’s transportation system and economy. The unions and their captive handmaidens, also known as the Democratic party and the national media, went ballistic. How cruel! How heartless! The press profiled dozens of Reagan’s victims. But he hung tough. After all, the Gipper was the man who, when governor of California, said of the Berkeley protestors, “If it takes a bloodbath now, let’s get it over with.”

Christopher DeMuth, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, and one of the smartest men in Christendom, has argued that this was Reagan’s greatest accomplishment. Why? Because it sent the message throughout the American economy that organized labor wasn’t going to spread the disease of Eurosclerosis in the United States. In places like France, unions to this day run the show (unless the Germans phone in new orders).

There was a very serious threat that the same rot of democratic socialism could sink into the pillars of the American economy (remember Nixon’s “wages and price controls,” Carter’s rationing). Reagan’s shot across the bow of the Left woke up corporate managers long accustomed to having the government siding with labor. Reagan stared down the creeping forces of soft-socialism and the American people cheered him for it. All of a sudden, corporate America got the message that they could undergo the painful restructuring that was desperately needed.

* * *

Calvin Coolidge’s handling of the Boston police strike is often seen as the closest parallel to Reagan’s sacking of the controllers. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at anytime,” declared silent Cal. Of course, Coolidge said this when he was governor of Massachusetts (I say “of course” because I looked it up and it makes me sound like I knew it already). But it was that statement that got him on Warren Harding’s ticket as vice president (Americans were sick of strikes back then. In 1919 alone there were some 4 million workers on strike, at a cost to the nation of about $4 billion). And it was that attitude that made Coolidge America’s most underrated president.

Or to put it another way:

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Fox News rounds up “Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts,” to which Yid with Lid adds two more for a classic Lettermanesque Top Ten list — just add them both to ever-growing pile of not-so-final countdowns and we can resurrect this infamous YouTube clip:

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In Europe, the USS Neverdock notes, “Berlin sees most snow in December since 1900s.” Glad to see that eco-Anchluss is working out so well for them.

Meanwhile, as far as Britain and botched predictions, let’s flashback to a year ago to a post we had on January 8 titled, “The Alpha And The Omega Of Liberal Fascism:”

Granted, it’s from a British newspaper, which means take it with a grain of salt (or at least, as big of a grain of sodium chloride as you’d take an article in an American newspaper), but if true, this story sounds truly frightening:

Pensioners burn books for warmth

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.

Jonathan Stearn, energy expert for Consumer Focus, said: ‘If pensioners are taking such desperate measures to heat their homes it is shocking. With low wholesale prices and increasing profit margins, there is clearly room for energy companies to make price cuts immediately.’

Ruth Davison, of the National Housing Federation, said: ‘The spiralling cost of energy means heating homes has become a luxury rather than a necessity for many people – particularly the elderly, low paid and unemployed.’

As science blog Watts Up With That? notes, “Shades of Fahrenheit 451″

But in addition to Ray Bradbury’s famous dystopian novel (which previously echoed more than a little in last year’s Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act story), it’s also the alpha and the omega of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, now celebrating its second anniversary. The rulers of National Socialist Germany burned books because they were frightened by their content; the citizens of socialist England burn books because of their nation’s whackadoodle environmentally correct energy policies.

And speaking of which, great “Final Countdown” find by Sonic Frog.net:

Prince Charles: Eighteen months

to stop climate change disaster

The Prince of Wales has warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless urgent action is taken to save the rainforests.

In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a £15 billion annual programme was required to halt deforestation or the world would have to live with the dire consequences.

“We will end up seeing more drought and starvation on a grand scale. Weather patterns will become even more terrifying and there will be less and less rainfall,” he said.

The P.C. prince made the above claim in May of 2008. (He would make yet another final final countdown this past summer, and no doubt, there are more to come.) Those eighteen months he warned us about so portentiously have now passed.

So to paraphrase Lauri B. Regan at the American Thinker, “Hey Chuck, how’s all that global warming working out for you?”

Update: “Only 9,099 Of Last 10,500 Years Warmer Than 2010.”

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Last January, I did a parody of Time magazine’s infamous 1966 “Is God Dead” cover, in which the magazine, strayed so far from its conservative roots under Henry Luce in the 1920s that it finally met up with Nietzsche’s late 19th century aphorism. Nietzsche essentially forecast the horrors of the 20th century as a whole with his statement; it may not be a coincidence that the late 1960s and 1970s were pretty hellish in their own right in America after Time made theirs.

Here’s my version from January, in which I figured that if Nietzsche’s self-designated Übermensch could kill off God, as a self-designated uberblogger, I had sufficient chutzpah (and Photoshop skills) to kill off the smiting deity of the puritanical enviro-doomsday movement:

But on Tim Blair’s Website yesterday, I came across this:

Malcolm Muggeridge, call your office; once again reality has outpaced satire.

Oh and Time, might want to call yours, too, or at least a snow plow.

Related: What hath Gaia wrought?!

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Caution, language alert — though I wouldn’t blame you if you added a few sympathetic retorts yourself while watching this:

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Update: Thanks to its being featured on Drudge, Tim Blair’s blog, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze Website, Gawker, et al, the above great moment in New York civil service under the capable hand of Nanny Bloomberg has 999,374 views on YouTube as of 11:30 PM, PST. To borrow from a related post from Glenn Reynolds, that’s “probably good news for Obama, as a third-party Bloomberg bid would probably siphon off squishy ‘no labels’ types from the Democrats.”

Meanwhile, found via Donald Douglas, here’s a time-lapse portrait of what this weekend in Belmar, New Jersey, 65 miles south of New York, looked like:

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At Newsreal, Megan Fox (no not her, the other one) sums up the endless Mobius Loop that is global warming:

It’s too cold? Global Warming. Too much rain? Global Warming. Not enough rain? Global Warming. Unseasonable snow in Texas, Global Warming. It’s their answer to everything. Do they know how dumb they look? Here’s a hilarious quote from “experts” as reported by ABC News.

But experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all — it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

How do they know “Global Warming” wasn’t a blip in the long-term global weather trends? “Tragically desperate” is the only phrase I can think of to describe such maniacal rantings.

Ever since those emails surfaced proving what we all thought was happening is happening (the faking of data to “prove” the Global Warming hoax) the perpetrators have been demanding loudly we pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. But we’ve seen him. The jig is up! Give up already. You’re embarrassing yourselves.

Or as Ann Althouse wrote last week, “When everything is evidence of the thing you want to believe, it might be time to stop pretending you’re all about science.”

Elsewhere, James Taranto discovers his inner Public Enemy: “Fear of a White Planet.”

And finally, Climate Depot is your one-stop Drudge Report-style place for a skeptical look at the warm-mongering left.

(Headline from the London Independent of March 2000.)

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New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has been infamous for nearly a decade as the micromanaging leader of Manhattan’s Nanny State, banning smoking, transfats, and being more obsessed with bike paths than even Howard Dean.

But you would think that a guy that obsessed with big government could at least get the basics right:

He defended his decision not to declare a snow emergency, saying “that would have made the situation worse,” by forcing motorists to move parked cars from major streets.  While about 1,000 stuck vehicles have been removed from just three major expressways, the mayor said that some 40 city ambulances and just under 300 buses remain marooned in the snow.

Two days after slamming the tri-state, millions continue to dig out from a storm that shut down area airports, crippled commuter train and subway service and stranded thousands traveling during the holiday weekend.

The sixth largest snowstorm in the history of New York City dumped two feet of snow and left many, especially those living in the outer boroughs and small suburban side streets, feeling trapped or ignored as city resources went to dig out Manhattan.

“I’m furious at Mayor Bloomberg, he’s a rich man, so he doesn’t care about the little people,” said New Enrico’s Car Service livery driver Julio Carpio, speaking in Spanish. “I have to work, why aren’t people out there plowing? Why does the mayor always go on TV the night before to say, ‘We’re all set with a fleet of salt trucks,’? and then you never see a single truck. They always abandon Queens.”

On Twitter, Jim Geraghty joked, “I guess NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg hates to see a lot of salt on food and roads.”

But he wouldn’t be the first “progressive” mayor with such a concern — as it always does, real-life has once again outrun satire.

Related: And speaking of political Nannies, “The Obamas Police Food and Football,” Bryan Preston writes. What could go wrong?

Meanwhile at Hot Air, “Can-do billionaire technocrat not doing so well coping with snow.”

More: Dan Spencer asks, “Is Bloomberg’s inability to cope with snow storm a labor dispute?”

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Awww: Louisiana flood control expert Spike Lee, who in mid-2008 predicted that “you’ll have to measure time by ‘Before Obama’ and ‘After Obama’ .. It’s an exciting time to be alive now,” remains a fervent parishioner, despite Paradise Lost.

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Another leftwing meme from the mid-naughts has echoes with the current administration: 70 days in, as Allahpundit writes, “Finally: Feds to accept help from 12 countries in dealing with oil spill.”

Optics like this aren’t helping the president’s fading status:

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Rush Limbaugh:

I just stole a glance at MSNBC. You know, there’s a tropical disturbance out there southeast of the Yucatan peninsula. The National Hurricane Center has been going back and forth on the odds of it becoming a tropical storm. Today the odds are high that it’s gonna become one. So now all the meteorologists are out there trying to figure out, because the track model has it going either right at New Orleans, some of them take to the east, some to the west of New Orleans, and, of course, here come the, “Oh, God, we hope so! We don’t really hope so. Oh, we hope it! Please let’s not have this. We want this disaster.” I mean the media is going back and forth. They really want it. So I’m watching Brian Williams, I know Brian Williams, Brian Williams I would say is an acquaintance, certainly, and a friend of mine, and Brian Williams is talking to Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, about all of the new science being learned here about can a hurricane form with oil on the surface of the sea, of the Gulf of Mexico, because it affects the temperature, and of course hurricanes do not feed off of oil, they feed off of warm water.

So they’re wondering that maybe the hurricanes destined for the Gulf are not going to form because of so much oil on the surface. They don’t know. They’re speculating. It’s new science. So they’re kind of torn. Folks, I’m not making this up. They really want a hurricane with oil plastered all over everywhere so they can tarnish Big Oil and the private sector. And on the other hand they don’t want it because of all the damage it would do to people. But man, they would love it. They’re really torn. Oh, gosh, we really hope there’s a hurricane. No, we don’t, but we would love to cover an oil hurricane. Oh, yeah. Man, could we really tar and feather Big Oil, but we don’t want the people to get hurt, but if the people get hurt, it makes an even better story. So what do we do? They’re flipping coins, do we or don’t we want a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

To flashback to a video of ours from 2008, it wouldn’t be the first time that the left has openly rooted for a hurricane to rampage through flyover country:

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Because you can’t spell the words “Bad Presidential Optics” without the letters P.B.O.

Related: A surprisingly prescient New Yorker cover. Because even the blind tiny mummies occasionally get one right.

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Last year around this time, far left Harper’s magazine, unwittingly echoing similar comparisons made during the presidential race by the starboard half of the Blogosphere (including by your humble narrator), finally stumbled upon the similarities between progressive presidents Obama and Hoover, creating the above graphic in the process.

Obama as the second coming of Herbert Hoover? We should be so lucky, Roger L. Simon wrote late last night:

Barack Obama made a dull speech on Tuesday evening. And he made a frightened speech — an overly careful assembly of energy cliches likely to be remembered by no one. All this in the face of the greatest ecological catastrophe in American history, the seemingly unending oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

This was a man playing catch-up, aware that the public is apparently even less enamored of him on this issue than they were of George W. Bush on Katrina. It was time for Obama to show he cared. He didn’t do much of a job of that even. Obama is no Clinton. The current president doesn’t do empathy well. He seems like a man who has to be reminded to be empathic, even though in situations like the Gulf it is the most obvious presidential, really human, behavior. Yet it took him weeks to make this flaccid speech.

But let me be clear. There are many things for which I blame Barack Obama. I could make a long list from hugely destructive government over-spending to a foreign policy that Orwell might call “objectively pro-fascist.” But the oil disaster in the Gulf is not one of them. Barack Obama is no more responsible for the unending leak than Bush was for Katrina.

So he is not to blame for this and he really isn’t to blame that its solution has dragged on and on. He wasn’t elected as scientist-in-chief. He knows nothing about petroleum engineering, just as he knows nothing about global warming. We haven’t had a president with the skills of that type since Herbert Hoover — a mining engineer. In fact, Hoover was the only president we ever had with significant background and expertise to actually take a hands-on approach to a catastrophe of this nature.

Indeed. As Amity Shlaes wrote in September of 2005 in the midst of both the real and media-ginned up aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as she was assembling material for her 2007 book on the Hoover-FDR years, The Forgotten Man:

Even centralisers among them did not see Washington’s role as handling events like Katrina. Towns, counties or, at the very highest, states were responsible for citizen safety. Washington could not intrude uninvited.Sound principles were behind such federalism. The first was local sovereignty: a rescuing Washington was a threatening Washington. There was also the matter of moral hazard: if localities knew they could count on Washington, they would not take care to stay out of harm’s way. Most Americans, moreover, nursed a suspicion that Washington’s bureaucracies might not do important work as well as local authorities did.

There was also a fear of the opposite: that an efficient centralised government would prove so compelling as to make its expansion impossible to check. Inefficiency, the bungling of co-ordination efforts, might even be a good thing, if it slowed the rise of tyrants. Whenever confronting emergency – from uprisings of native Americans to epidemics of influenza – officials thought twice about whether the rescue job was truly Washington’s.

The example of federalism in action most relevant to Katrina was the Mississippi flood of 1927. The flood covered whole states. Waters raging up to 100 feet high drove 1.5m from their homes. The flood destroyed 2m acres of crops, the region’s livelihood.

President Calvin Coolidge paused – and decided the flood was not the president’s job. To manage the rescue he sent Herbert Hoover – his own version of Rudy Giuliani, who got New York back to work after the attacks of four years ago. But the Mississippi rescue was different from the sort expected today. Hoover, the commerce secretary, had no giant government cheques. His role was more that of broker than funder. He negotiated among states; his Red Cross drive raised $15m. When Hoover needed something, he found donors or simply commandeered goods. Sawmills along the river hammered out 1,000 rough wooden boats. Outboard motor manufacturers supplied 1,000 motors (of which only 120 were returned). The Pullman Company provided Hoover with his own train cars – including a dining car – so that he might inspect his refugee camps.

The 1927 rescue was greatly flawed. Bigoted rescuers treated blacks as second-class citizens or worse. Blacks found themselves stranded on levees. Malaria and typhoid plagued camps. Still, the rescue provided a model of leadership that could have been useful this time around. Hoover became so famous he claimed the presidency with ease the following year.

But then, that was when we still bothered to check to see if prospective presidents actually did stuff before running for office.

Update: Forget Hoover; Obama seems to be channeling the spirit of Nancy Reagan, circa 1985: Just say no — to absolutely everything.

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As the Anchoress writes, “Obama Knew Spill Scope from Day 1:”

President Obama surely cannot be blamed for (or personally do anything about) “the damn hole,” that–even “capped”– is still gushing oil into (and beyond) the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s why reasonable people have not been the ones insisting that the president play superhero, or display reassuring “concern” by doing a public freak-out. In a crisis, you want the president to be calm and collected.

But Obama just as surely could have informed the nation that we were facing a long-term assault on our environment that would have wide repercussions.

He could have put his legendary oratorical skills to work, communicating an appreciation of the gravity of the situation, and an assurance that everything that could possibly be done to protect the environment was being done.

That was his fundamental job as president: clear communication of the struggle ahead, and reassurance that all possible efforts at collection and containment were operational. That is what he could have done, and did not; six weeks into it, he still has not really managed it.

We’ve just spent years listening to ungenerous, miserable people excoriate President Bush for calmly taking 7 minutes, after learning of the attacks of 9/11, to allow his Secret Service to do their thing and to–with a great deal of composure–take his leave from a classroom without managing to scare the children or give an impression of fear that would be put before the nation and the world.

After watching President Obama take six weeks to process the terrible news he was given–pressing forward with golf, vacations, parties and fund-raisers in order to not scare the nation–even if that it meant he seemed a little disengaged from the BP Oil disaster, I never want to hear another sneering, idiotic My Pet Goat joke, again.

Oh you will, you will — but at least there’s a rejoinder now. (And there was back then — one: until the second plane hit the WTC, it wasn’t clear if it was a catastrophic air disaster, or terrorism; two: why scare the daylights out of a bunch of innocent kids?) Just as the original cast and writers of Saturday Night Live were doing Nixon jokes six years after he left office, it’s inevitable that we’ll be hearing My Pet Goat references at least until 2019 or so. Consider the alternative for the left, as Michael Silence wrote at the Knoxville Sentinel:

Conservatives are up in arms. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) wants Sir Paul McCartney to apologize for saying: “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”

I’m not surprised that mantra is still hanging around. I mean, do you think they want to talk about the last 18 months?

But certainly those last 18 months have done much to place the previous eight years into sharp perspective.

Finally, as the Anchoress adds, “Instapundit and reader note Obama’s weak responses to any disasters that don’t affect a Democrat-majority. And Moe Lane has the chart to prove it.”

Insert obligatory Chicago-way style reference here.

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As Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote, when he reflected on “What Our Media Taught Me:”

I used to think, given the enormous size of the bureaucracy and the tragic nature of the human condition, that from time to time disasters would overwhelm us — and there would be not much the president of the United States could do about them. But after Katrina, the media taught me that neither the mayor nor the governor nor the Army Corps of Engineers nor the people of New Orleans were at fault for either the vulnerability to the chance of a catastrophic Katrina or the response after its arrival. No, you see, the commander in chief is the ultimate arbiter of successful or unsuccessful reactions to all such disasters. OK, so be it.So while I am not inclined to blame Barack Obama for the scandalous federal laxity in the now polluted Gulf, the media long ago taught me that I most certainly should.

As did Obama himself. Naked Emperor News flashes back to several quotes on President Bush and Katrina, beginning with March 2008, one of those moments when then-Senator Barack Obama, scoring quick wins against an inept Hillary campaign, thought that everything would come so easy once he was in the White House. “We’re going to do some hard thinking about how we could have failed our fellow citizens so badly.”

Indeed.™

Update: More pushback against Katrina-era leftwing bloviations: Monica Crowly has a few questions for Spike Lee and Kanye West.

Update: “Rudy Giuliani on Obama’s Response to BP Oil Spill: ‘If You Taught Leadership 101 This Would Be a Case Study on NOT What to Do’ (Video).”

Update: Two more Oba-rubes identify themselves.

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As Victor Davis Hanson quips in his latest PJM post, “Somewhere around the millennium, a new style of aggressive, public-interested, and astute reporter began sermonizing in print, advising on the Internet, and lecturing us on television:”

At the time I mistakenly assumed that reporters were too often partisans who were creating new, almost impossible standards of probity in order to embarrass conservative opponents: they wanted Republican scandal first, news second. But now, I see that they were simply laying nonpartisan new ground rules for the Bush administration so that they could later prove their integrity and professionalism when a member of their own faith would come into the new crucible of public examination. There was never, you see, a hate-Bush media. So we will shortly see that now as they unrelentingly turn their scrutiny on Barack Obama and his legion of ethical and competency lapses.

Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans was a horrific natural disaster that was whipped up into the Moral Equivalent of Iraq (with apologies to both William James and Jonah Goldberg) to, as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, allow the media to have a way “to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq,” adding, “No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the ‘inner smile.’”

And a rather prescient one at that.

But regime change in Iraq was a policy that President Clinton and Al Gore espoused in the 1990s (in-between the former’s regular games of golf, and other leisure-time pursuits). Of course, the media was willing to toss the history of the previous decade down the memory hole to attack President Bush on a regular basis. More from VDH:

I’ve been over here in Europe for about ten days, getting a different perspective on our illustrious media and how it is handling the various Obama “troubles.”

Perspective and distance are sometime valuable. I used to think, given the enormous size of the bureaucracy and the tragic nature of the human condition, that from time to time disasters would overwhelm us — and there would be not much the president of the United States could do about them. But after Katrina, the media taught me that neither the mayor nor the governor nor the Army Corps of Engineers nor the people of New Orleans were at fault for either the vulnerability to the chance of a catastrophic Katrina or the response after its arrival. No, you see, the commander in chief is the ultimate arbiter of successful or unsuccessful reactions to all such disasters. OK, so be it.

So while I am not inclined to blame Barack Obama for the scandalous federal laxity in the now polluted Gulf, the media long ago taught me that I most certainly should.

I don’t play golf. Never have swung a club. But in the spirit of live and let live, I also never cared much for deconstructing the game in terms of culture and sociology. The media, however, in 2002, taught met that I should in the case of George Bush — that his swing and even his use of a golf cart reflected a certain class disdain for us, or at least a frat-boy frivolity at a time of two ongoing wars. So while I would like to give our present president a pass on his obsession with playing golf at a frequency far in excess to poor George Bush’s, I cannot. I am conditioned now to grasp that Obama’s golf craze is a sort of self-indulgence reflective of a disturbing narcissist who entertains a shocking indifference toward the rest of us.

Sort of along the lines of the media’s caricatures of Dick Cheney, albeit without the competence, or executive-level experience acquired working under multiple American presidents, including the first President Bush.

And speaking of whom: “Message: I care.”

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