Some Exasperating Liberal Myths

Swift Boat Veterans:
The liberal media and some Democratic politicians sometimes refer sneeringly to “Swiftboating” someone as if it were commonly understood by all that the Swift Boat veterans were lying about John Kerry. As a matter of fact, it was Kerry who told some whoppers about his Vietnam service, who obviously managed that service to build a record he could use in politics, who lied about the activities of his former comrades, and has not, to this date, released his medical records as he has promised to do over and over again. The Swift Boat Veterans performed another honorable service by informing the American public of John Kerry’s duplicity.

What "Swiftboating" really means is 'publishing the truth about someone or something'.

Willie Horton:
George Bush 41 is castigated now and then, almost 20 years after that presidential campaign, for racism in raising the issue of the Willie Horton furlough under Michael Dukakis in Massachusetts. As a former resident of that state (unfortunately for me I lived there while Dukakis and Kerry were governor and lieutenant-governor, respectively), I was outraged at the policy of issuing furloughs to convicted murderers, who were serving life terms. What is the sense of that? Here is what Answers.com says about Willie Horton: “On October 26, 1974, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Horton and two accomplices robbed Joseph Fournier, a 17-year-old gas station attendant, stabbed him 19 times, and left him in a trash can.

Fournier died from blood loss. Horton was convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment, and incarcerated at the Concord Correctional Facility in Massachusetts.

On June 6, 1986, he was released as part of a weekend furlough program but did not return. On April 3, 1987 in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Horton twice raped a local woman after pistol-whipping, knifing, binding, and gagging her fiancé. He then stole the car belonging to the man he had assaulted, but was later captured by police after a chase. On October 20, Horton was sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. The sentencing judge refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, saying, "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again." This was reported in the October 1987 Reader's Digest.

Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts at the time, and while he did not start the furlough program, he had supported it as a method of criminal rehabilitation. The State inmate furlough program was actually signed into law by Republican Governor Francis W. Sargent in 1972. However, in 1976, Governor Dukakis vetoed a bill that would have made inmates convicted of first-degree murder ineligible for furloughs.” Answers.com

Darwinism:
Charles Darwin postulated theories based on common descent, random mutation and natural selection that all living creatures are related, that minor beneficial changes spread through populations, and that successive changes lead to new structures and new species. Modern science, with the aid of the electron microscope, has pretty well proven that he was right about common descent and minor beneficial changes, but that new structures and new species are so improbable as to be impossible through Darwinian methods. Despite that, both Creationists and Secular-Progressives refuse to accept the results of modern science because what has been learned conflicts with their world views.

Man-made Global Warming:

A Summer Chill
By Peter Hannaford, American Spectator (Excerpt)

Published 8/27/2007

“Have you noticed the silence about this year's hurricanes from Al Gore, Pontiff of The Holy Order of the Sky Is Falling? As last year's hurricane season began, the pontiff and his acolytes cheerfully predicted a series of devastating hurricanes. None came. So far this year it's been Dean, which put the east coast of Mexico awash, but without huge losses. Silence from THOOTSIF. No wonder.

Global warming measured over the last century ranges from one to two degrees Fahrenheit. Mr. Gore routinely preaches that it will get ever warmer and calamity will ensue. Since he contends that human beings are the cause of this, his remedy is to crank down industrial society. Alas, the weather is not cooperating with his theory.

On July 9, two days after THOOTSIF's much ballyhooed worldwide series of rock concerts, it snowed in Buenos Aires for the first time since 1918. July, remember, is winter in Argentina, but the season's temperatures are usually akin to those of California or Florida.

In Sacramento, California, where 100-plus temperature in the summer are common, on August 4 it went down from 104 to 74 the next day. It happened again on August 6, setting the lowest high temperature for that day in 101 years.

We have Lloyd Billingsley of the Pacific Research Institute to thank for both pieces of news, inasmuch as the news media (other than the hometown ones in B.A. and Sacramento) seem not to have noticed it. That's not surprising since most of them have long since bought into THOOTSIF's mantra, to wit, that catastrophic future global warming is "settled science." It's not.

The predictions of calamity rest on computer models that are no better than their design. An article by British researchers in the journal Science this month makes the point that "A common criticism of global climate models, particularly for predicting the coming decade, has been that they only include facts such as solar radiation, atmospheric aerosol and greenhouses, which are affected by changes from outside the climate system, [but ignore] climate variability that arises from natural changes within the system, such as El Nino, fluctuations in ocean circulation and anomalies in ocean heat content."

Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson casts more doubt on the use of land temperatures to build predictive computer models. About average land temperature, he says, "there's no way you can measure it."

If climate modeling is as inexact as these scientists say, shouldn't Congress take their views into account before trying to pass draconian laws that would increase the cost of energy and hurt our economy?

The global warming alarmists had been pointing to 1998 as evidence that the warming trend is current. It was, they claimed, the hottest year on record, buttressing their contention that the warming trend is a result of the large increase in worldwide industrial production since World War II. Alas, NASA has just rained on their parade. It says 1934 -- in the midst of the Great Depression -- was the hottest year and that 1921, 1931 and 1938 were also among the Top Ten.

Despite all this bad news for the alarmists they manage to keep the "mainstream" media in a state of agitation. Typical of their stories, these August 8 headlines: Washington Post, "Across the Globe, Extremes of Heat and Rain"; the New York Times, "Warming Threatens Farms in India, U.N. Official Says."

It turns out these are nothing new. A researcher at the Library of Congress recently came across this Page 2 story in the Washington Post of November 2, 1922: "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt." Sound familiar? The Business & Media Institute recently completed a study in which it said that the media "have warned about impending climate doom four different times in the past 100 years."