The Wind Cries Barry

Jay Nordlinger writes that it’s all quiet on multiple weather fronts this year:

Friends, do you remember that crazy period we had for a while where people said that George W. Bush and the Republican party were responsible for hurricanes? We had hurricanes all around us, and it was because we evil GOP-ers refused to do anything about global warming, which was causing these hurricanes and subjecting us to something like divine wrath.

Indeed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a piece in The Huffington Post after Hurricane Katrina: “For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind.”

To recall this nutty — and malign — period, see a piece I did for NR called “All the Uglier,” here. It deals with reaction to Katrina — reactions such as Kennedy’s. You may be shocked to be reminded what people were saying, because it has been four years: almost four years exactly since Katrina, although the nuttiness about Bush and hurricanes lasted well beyond Katrina.

Why am I bringing all this up? This morning, I saw a headline from the AP: “Hurricane season has been a dud — so far.” The article is here. And it points out that “only two hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic over the past three months, and neither hit the U.S. — a somewhat unusual lull.”

That Barack Obama: He may not have lowered the oceans yet — has he? — but he has certainly stopped the hurricanes.

What a crazy country we are, sometimes. As George Gilder pointed out recently, the real threat to us is not the Islamists or the ChiComs or anybody else: It’s us.

Found via Andy McCarthy, David Horowitz notes:

According to his own account, Van Jones became a “communist” during a prison term he served after being arrested during the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. For the next ten years Jones was an activist in the Maoist organization STORM – “Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.” When STORM disintegrated Jones joined the Apollo Alliance and the Center for American Progress Democrats. As he explained to the East Bay Express in a 2005 article, he still considered himself a “revolutionary, but just a more effective one.” “Before,” he told the Express, “we would fight anybody, any time. No concession was good enough;… Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward…. I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”

Pursuing the deep satisfaction of radical ends is the clear sub-text of Jones’ 2007 book, The Green Collar Economy which comes with a Forward by Robert Kennedy Jr. and enthusiastic blurbs from Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore. According to Jones, the Katrina tragedies were caused by global warming, white supremacy, free market economics and the “war for oil” in Iraq. This “perfect storm” of social evils deprived poor blacks of the protection of adequate levees and private vehicles which would have allowed them to escape. The fact that a fleet of public buses was available but the black mayor and the black power structure in New Orleans failed to deploy them go unmentioned in Jones’ indictment of white racism. Instead, “The Katrina story illustrates clearly the two crises we face in the United States: radical socioeconomic inequality and rampant environmental destruction.” To deal with these crises “we will need both political and economic transformation – immediately.”

Can’t say I’m surprised by any of this, topics I explored in this September 2008 video from immediately after the GOP convention: