Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

A comment on the left-wing AmericaBlog sums up the left's view of the current political situation in America:

"Bush cannot be allowed to appoint 2 SC Justices. He has to be stopped, and maybe Katrina Hurricane has shown us the way. I'm not a big believer in divine intervention... but Bushco have never been weaker, and now is the time to kick them while they are down."

Clearly there are leftists out there whose primary goal is to "kick them", but behind the scenes there are Democratic activists with more serious - and dangerous - goals.

Two main thrusts of left-wing political opportunism following Katrina come from the racists and the radical environmentalists. Please note that I do not live by the politically correct prohibition against saying that someone who hates Caucasians is racist; Not all racists are white.

On the racist side, black leaders like Al Sharpton, rapper Kanye West (appropriately enough quoted on Al Jazeera), and Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) are claiming that the response to the hurricane would have been swifter if a higher percentage of the victims had been white.

What do they want? Two things: 1) To convince African-Americans that Republicans hate them, to motive them to get out and vote (for Democrats) in upcoming elections, and 2) To encourage more collectivist economic policy, i.e. to increase the degree to which government behaves like Robin Hood. While some think it's a noble goal to "steal from the rich to give to the poor", the bottom line is that Robin Hood was a thief. "Thief" is not an appropriate role for govermnent, though one it plays all too often and all too well.

Bastiat, in his seminal 1850 treatise on the law called, not surprisingly "The Law" seems to be speaking of today's Democrats:

"See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

"Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

"The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights...."

Sound familiar, Senators Kennedy, Schumer, Feinstein, Kennedy, and fellow travelers?

The next group of left-wing opportunists is the enviro-radicals who are already making claims that global warming was responsible for the severity of Katrina, despite piles of scientific evidence to the contrary and no evidence to support their claims.

Even the quasi-respectable Time Magazine gets into the game. The author leaves him wiggle room when he says "So is global warming making the problem worse? Superficially, the numbers say yes." The important word here is "superficially". In fact, the numbers show that changes in ocean temperatures account for less than 10% of the variation in the size and strength of hurricanes, and that both of these measures are lower on average lately than they have been in past decades.

The left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists has the nerve to make the decidedly unscientific statement that "Climate scientists around the world are certain that rising ocean temperatures are a result of global warming." In fact there are plenty of scientists who are unsure of that, or who are fairly sure it's just wrong.

Enviro-radicals, or at least their ideas, are even more dangerous than the racist radicals because the target of environmentalists is capitalism. Their goals are such things as the Kyoto Protocol which, even supports say, might lower temperatures by less than a degree over many decades at the cost of billions (or trillions) of lost economic production. In other words, the possibility of keeping temperatures from rising a fraction of a degree is more important than the certainty of increasing unemployement, decreasing quality of life, or any other economic measure which actually matters to people's lives.

Make no mistake, environmental radicals hate capitalism, free markets, and rationality. For them as well as for the somewhat less radical scientists Katrina represents a great opportunity to use hyperbole and junk science for fundraising, getting grants, and generally panicking the public for their own cynical purposes.

[Note: I highly suggest anyone interested in the issue read Michael Crichton's latest novel, State of Fear, about environmental radicals and the actual science of climate change.]

The Federal Government's apparently inept response to the disaster in New Orleans gives leftist, racist and environmental radicals an opening...at least for fund-raising if not for a serious political move at this moment. For those of us who believe in liberty, capitalism, and the ideals of our Founding Fathers, we must be wary of these radical groups whose agendas are to destroy what makes America great.