Charlie, your post reminded me of Hurricane Katrina, and its nasty political aftermath. Has it really been seven years? Seems like yesterday. I wrote about the political aftermath in an NR piece called “All the Uglier: What Katrina whipped up.” It contained many quotations such as the ones you have in your post.
The Boston Globe ran an op-ed piece that said, “The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.” I was shocked when I read that, and things like it, considering it crudest propaganda. Now it is routine (and still crude propaganda). A writer in the Huffington Post said, “Would New Orleans and the nearby Gulf Coast be suffering so terribly today if President Carter [had] beat[en] back Reagan in 1980?” And so on.
I wrote, “To an amazing extent, global warming has become all-explaining. It is the cause of our natural ills, in all their diversity. It is an idée fixe, a universal bogey. Just as the Jew is both a communist and a capitalist, and the American both a materialist and a puritan, global warming is responsible for heat and cold, drought and flood — anything nature might be throwing at us at the moment. When Al Gore gives a speech on global warming, he is apt to say, ‘We’ve been having some weird weather lately, haven’t we?’ The word weird covers a multitude of conditions.”
If Romney is elected, Guantanamo Bay will be bad again. The Patriot Act will be bad again. Drones will be very bad. The media will notice the homeless again. They will rediscover the poor in general. And, of course, hurricanes will be the fault of the president — just as Katrina was in 2005 (although, it’s true, the one writer blamed Reagan too, giving George W. Bush some company).
I’m not sure the Left is ever so maddening, and mad, as when they talk about the weather. No, race is No. 1. Long has been, long will be. The weather, possibly No. 2.