More Wrong Stuff

I've been thinking about a global-warming-is-a-hoax speech given by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) on the senate floor in January, 2005. Here is my favorite part:

"In addition, last month, popular author Dr. Michael Crichton, who has questioned the wisdom of those who trumpet a "scientific consensus," released a new book called State of Fear, which is premised on the global warming debate. I'm happy to report that Dr. Crichton's new book reached #3 on the New York Times bestseller list."

Crichton wrote fiction. "State of Fear" is fiction.

I took a quick look back at some of Crichton's other books. Andromeda Strain (1969) is about a deadly pathogen that hitchhikes to earth on a military satellite. Forty years after that alarmist fiction was published, we have yet to find any extraterrestrial microbes. Hasn't happened. Jurassic Park (1990) describes living dinosaurs created in a laboratory by cloning DNA taken from blood in amber-preserved prehistoric mosquitoes. Exciting premise. Hasn't happened. It's fiction. Rising Sun (1992) is a murder thriller as soap box for Crighton's warning about economic warfare by Japan against the United States. The book's publication coincided with the start of Japan's lost decade; ten years of economic decline, real estate busts, and price deflation.

Clown Car

I wish I could draw. Palin's pickup by Fox News suggests a political cartoon derived from the old circus visual cliche where a stream of clowns get out of a tiny car. The new version shows a television tuned to Fox with a line of clown-attired pundits spewing from the screen. Palin leads O'Reilly, Rove, Hannity, Beck, the Cheneys, Perino, Goldberg, and the rest. I see them all Munchkin-sized, in polka dots, orange bozo wigs, white gloves, huge shoes, and red globe noses. They strut into some poor bastard's living room, arms bent and elbows swinging in exaggerated happy self-importance.

Fool me twice...

(h/t driftglass)

No wonder the neocons did such a great job selling the Iraq war. Rummy, Cheney, and Wolfie had practiced combining delusion and fear thirty years earlier during the Ford administration:


Those clowns rolled the CIA in the mid-70's. Cheney learned how to bully and cherry-pick until the facts fit his expectations. The neocons got away with it then, and used the same script beginning September 11, 2001.

I have often wondered why our spies were seemed so wrong about the Soviet Union. Reagan and his cronies described the Russians as massively powerful and fearsome while the Soviet Union was withered and destitute. Now, I know. The neocons ignored reality. It was an overlimit credit card notice hidden unopened at the bottom of the in basket. Much better to pull every piece of information inside out until war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.