We had lots of fun over the weekend — which we all miraculously survived, oddly enough — comparing Saturday’s end of the world with the global warming paranoia of the last 41 years or so. And Power Line’s John Hinderaker adds another doomsday cult to the list — “Repent! The End of Keynesian Economics Is At Hand!”
But as Dennis Prager writes, “global warming is only the most recent doomsday scenario offered by the Left. Here is a small sample of some others:”
Recall the Time and Newsweek cover stories about how heterosexual AIDS would become a national plague — since “AIDS doesn’t discriminate.” Skeptics who said at the time that heterosexual AIDS in America was largely a scare story were called “anti-science.” But Michael Fumento, the science writer who wrote “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,” first in Commentary magazine and then as a book, turned out to be right. In America it was a myth.At the Democratic National Convention in 2000, five children ages about five to eleven were featured; they recited lyrics about the doomsdays they could look forward to as they grew up in America. The first child, for example, said this: “When I grow up . . . Will I be able to see a rainbow in a smog-filled sky? Will there be any trees alive?”
In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich wrote: “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Another doomsday prophecy from the Left: Two prominent feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf, wrote in their bestselling books, Revolution from Within and The Beauty Myth — and the news media reported — that 150,000 girls and women a year die of anorexia nervosa. The number is actually fewer than 100.
There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The Left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science.
Which brings us to two items currently being juxtaposed by Matt Drudge:
Fortunately, as the second headline indicates, America is giving Al Gore’s apocalyptic visions the concern that they’re due. Particularly since he hasn’t seemed to have fully internalized his own fears quite yet.
Update: We only have five, eight, ten, forty, 100 years left to save the planet.
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