On Tuesday, I visited the offices of two local congressmen: Cincinnati’s Steve Chabot and Northern Kentucky’s Thomas Massie.
My self-appointed mission was to observe appearances by protesting members of Organizing for Action, the now supposedly “independent” entity which until late last year ran President Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
All of OFA’s protest visits “just so happen” to target 135 Republicans characterized as “climate deniers.” As a result, on Wednesday, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, one of the very few real heroes in what used to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, announced an investigation into whether OFA has violated the Hatch Act’s prohibition against engaging in political campaign activities.
OFA recruited activists for the day’s visits around the country from its email list of millions to “draw attention to” and pressure these “deniers” to accept the supposedly irrefutable “science” of climate change, aka allegedly human-caused global warming. After all, as Obama himself tweeted, “#ScienceSaysSo.”
Unfortunately for Team Obama, the climate hasn’t been cooperating with their corrupted “science” for quite some time. Despite attempts by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to spin it as yet another disastrous year for warming, calendar 2012 was among the coolest so far this century. More importantly, the warmists’ meme, which is that most of the warmest years since records have been kept have occurred since the turn of the century, is more than a little suspect. NOAA, in a possible move to increase the credibility of future results, is closing 600 “hot” weather stations, many of which were apparently placed in locations deliberately designed to generate artificially high temperatures to rig overall results.
OFA insists that “97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is real.” What a crock. In February, James Taylor at Forbes pointed to a peer-reviewed study which showed, in Taylor’s words, that “only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis.” The rest of the “scientists” must be those who, like so many other Americans, have been duped by over two decades of non-stop propaganda.
OFA’s visit to Chabot’s office was scheduled for noon. As I rode up the elevator to the 30th floor of downtown Cincinnati’s iconic Carew Tower to get there, I was concerned that I was only five minutes early, and that it might be difficult to make my way through the teeming crowd which would surely be occupying the congressman’s lobby.
I need not have worried. After buzzing me in, Chabot’s staff greeted me in a nearly empty waiting room. I told them that I would stay there until the OFA people arrived. The staff had apparently just become aware that they would be having visitors because of the one and only OFA supporter who preceded me, good ol’ Steve.
As it turns out, Steve doesn’t even live in Chabot’s district, but felt like he could come to the event and represent others in his extended family who do.
After sitting down, I snapped a picture of Steve, who proceeded to ask me why I did that. I vaguely told him I was “monitoring the situation.”
Noon went by. Then it became 12:05. Then 12:10.
At 12:12, we were told by someone on Chabot’s staff that the OFA group had said they were on their way up from the ground floor.
12:15 become 12:20, 12:25, and 12:30.
Finally, an exasperated Steve asked to have a one-on-one meeting with a member of the congressman’s staff. They agreed to a two-on-two, with yours truly being the other “OFA” person.
Just as we were starting whatever profound discussion Steve thought he was going to have in the office’s conference room, the OFA contingent showed up in the waiting room — all two dozen of them, at most (click on each picture to view in a separate tab or window):
Keep in mind that on any given business day, 60,000 people are working in downtown Cincinnati, a large plurality of whom could easily have taken an hour-long lunch to be on hand for such a momentous occasion, and who would still have had plenty of time to grab a bite to eat before getting back to work.
What those who showed up had to say in support of their cause was as outdated and embarrassing as the signs a few of them held which read: “Global Warming Is Here.” Apparently, no one has enough energy to make new signs that read “Climate Change Is Real.”
When one of the protesters launched into a rant about Big Oil and how it would take real courage for Chabot to vote for the future of his grandchildren instead of the entities which provide him campaign cash, one of the congressman’s staffers pushed back politely but firmly. He reminded the crowd that “the congressman has voted repeatedly for renewable energy, and continues to support renewable energy. He’s in favor of an all-of-the-above strategy. The idea that he votes only for oil is silly.” He then reminded everyone that congressmen and staffers aren’t allowed to discuss campaigns and contributions in their congressional offices.
One of the protesters looked around at the plaques in the waiting area and said she’d like to see one from the Sierra Club some day. Chabot’s staffer humored her, saying, “I would too.” The fact of the matter is that the Sierra Club’s 2011 Energy Resource Policy document says that “by 2050 the US must eliminate virtually all use of fossil fuels.” If people as conservative as Chabot has been all of a sudden go to the enviros’ side to the point of getting Sierra Club plaques, everyone except the nation’s elite will have their standards of living set back by decades.
The visit to Congressman Massie’s office in Northern Kentucky ended up being a near replay of the humiliating one-person Obamacare “event” the Politico stumbled upon in Centreville, Virginia, earlier this month. Once again, just one person showed up. Looking on the bright side from OFA’s standpoint, that’s one more person than was seen in DC’s Georgetown on Tuesday, when “not a single person showed up … for a climate change agenda event.”
Massie’s OFA visitor was a know-it-all college student who arrived ten minutes early and gave the congressman’s district director a small, insulting “Climate Deniers Trophy.” The kid surely thought he had delivered a body blow to an oil-guzzling Neanderthal.
He had no idea what was coming. Nor did I.
The district director informed us, as the Wall Street Journal reported on August 1, that the congressman:
… lives off the electrical grid in a solar-powered home on a 1,200-acre farm in the Appalachian foothills. The first-year congressman and engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built the house from lumber he logged and milled.
He also drives “a Tesla electric sedan with a license plate that says, ‘Friends of Kentucky Coal.'”
In other words, though he is a “climate denier,” i.e., someone who won’t buckle to the false but politically correct “consensus,” Congressman Massie’s carbon footprint is probably far smaller than that of Bo, the Osprey-traveling presidential pooch.
Clearly, there is no energetic popular support in Greater Cincinnati, and apparently very little anywhere else in the nation, for Obama’s radical “climate change” agenda.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter to this administration, which is once again resorting to tyranny (“arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority”) when it can’t get its way.
On Wednesday, perhaps as frustrated with their ground troops’ apathy as they are with those in Congress they see as obstructionist, Gina McCarthy, Obama’s new EPA head, announced that, in the words of the Washington Times, they are “finished waiting for Congress to act on climate change,” and will “bypass the legislative branch in developing a federal response.”
I don’t see how Congress has any alternative but to say that they are finished funding the EPA until it returns to constitutional and scientific sanity.
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