In addition to the obvious collusion on display, one of the most curious elements of the JournoList, at least for me, was the rock ’em, sock ’em, throw ’em through plate glass windows, watch ’em die faux macho tone of the list. I’m not sure why it’s so prevlent on the list, but you can see it in action in two otherwise similar “modest proposal”-style posts regarding the religion of global warming — both its heretics and its true believers.
Regarding the latter group, at Ricochet, Pat Sajak, evidently secure enough in his status as a television icon to come out of the closet and reveal his conservative ideology, recently wrote:
Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.
Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.
Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically.
How about it? Why wait for governments to change us? You who have already seen the light have it within your grasp to act in concert with each other and change the world forever. And I hate to be a scold, but you have a special obligation to do it because you believe it so strongly. Then, instead of looking at isolated tree rings and computer models, you’d have real results to point to, and even the skeptics would see the error of their ways and join you.
So start Tweeting each other and get the ball rolling. We’ll anxiously await results. See, I told you I had the solution. My work here is done.
Contrast the remarkably gentle chiding displayed above with this: “Daily Kos Editor Says Skeptics Should Commit Suicide:”
A Daily Kos contributing editor has suggested that “Steve Milloy and his buddies” commit suicide or be euthanized apparently for the crime of opposing global warming alarmism.
Amid a rant on his Examiner.com blog about skeptics “carpet-bomb[ing] newspaper editorial pages with climate change disinformation…], Steven Alexander, who writes for Daily Kos under the nom-de-plume “Darksyde,” wrote that,
… if only Milloy and his buddies could check into one of the [Soylent Corporation’s] lovely medical suites for a short nature movie and a glass of wine…
The reference is to the assisted suicide scene in the 1973 movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston.
The Clarity Digital Group, which owns Examiner.com, removed the offensive posting immediately upon notification.
Former Washington Post reporter David Weigel was recently fired from the paper for privately writing on the Journolist listserv that Matt Drudge should “… set himself on fire.”
Now Alexander has publicly wished a similar fate for climate skeptics.
If you wonder why the skeptics fight so vigorously against the greenshirts, the sort of intolerance exhibited by Alexander over a mere difference in opinion is one reason. God help us all, if they prevail.
And speaking of the JournoList and horrific tone, Newsalert spots Eric Alterman attempting to defend his infamous Nascar “retard” statement:
I don’t have anything at all against people who like Nascar, (though even the concept of how such a thing could be enjoyable, admittedly, continues to elude me). People can like whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. To the degree that I do have an objection to Nascar, it is ecological. What I objected to, and what I’ve written about frequently—and would have been understood, I imagine, by most of the people in that private, off-the-record conversation—was the putatively liberal mainstream media treating the folks who like Nascar as “real Americans” and the rest of us who like jazz, foreign films, and prefer pinot noir to Budweiser as un-American commies who should have no say in our country’s future. This is why I am always defending New York, academics, the Upper West Side, even Zabar’s which always appear to be fair game with the So-called Liberal Media.
Alterman’s ecological complaints about Nascar come at a time when the president that the JournoList colluded to help elect is the de facto CEO of two of America’s three car companies. He could put them out of the Nascar business quite easily if wanted to. And all of the publications on the JournoList could push this story as well to help him. But as Betsy Newmark wrote in 2007, responding to a Jonah Goldberg column on Al Gore explicitly comparing manmade “Global Warming” to the Holocaust:
But, Goldberg asks, if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn’t Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming? For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won’t be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They’ll talk a good game, but they won’t actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters.
Oh to be a fly on the wall if a journalist (as opposed to a JournoList member) were to ever ask President Obama or Robert Gibbs about Nascar, Government Motors, and the limits of their radical environmental world view.
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