Psychadelic shopping aisle

Myron Ebell's excretions are more or less limited to wingnuts and his own CEI staff blog where his incisive rebuff of this newsweek column ["The Truth About Denial" By Sharon Begley, 13 August 2007]. He picked up on a small factual error in paragraph 22 of a 33 paragraph piece where it was actually the bonehead Fred Smith who made an initial phone call to the swift-boating and CIA-outing columnist Robert Novak and not Myron Ebell. Well, who gives a toss when the preceding 21 paragraphs of well-known serious allegations go unmentioned? Of course they aren't!

Myron continues:

On top of all the factual errors, the thesis is ridiculous. The idea that those opposed to global warming alarmism are well funded is easily disproved. Begley and her crew could have spent 10 minutes on the web comparing the annual budgets of the alarmist groups with the anti-alarmist groups. CEI has one of the larger efforts on our side, which amounts to less than one quarter of our annual four million dollar budget. Grist, the online environmental news and opinion outlet, this year quoted an unpublished foundation study that estimated that the alarmist groups have been spending $100-150 million a year to promote their cause. That’s not counting all the free media coverage and promotion or the outlandish scaremongering of scientists like James Hansen of NASA.

The reason that Begley can regurgitate propaganda as if it were established fact is because the alarmists’ megaphone is so large and ours is so small. As several Hill staffers have told me, Members of Congress have to be uncommonly brave to resist the global warming bandwagon because the alarmist message is pounded into them. Back home, their constituents are swayed by multimillion dollar advertising campaigns, which are echoed by Newsweek, Time, CBS, ABC, etc.

Whose bum was this pulled out of? Why don't you just throw in the full costs of those multi-billion dollar Antarctic expeditions for drilling ice-cores and doing the science which supports the "global warming alarmism"? After all, it's an integral part of their argument, while on your side you just have badly researched science fiction and illegitimate access to the public airways.

We know you're just a pack of water carriers for big oil, among which are the most profitable corporations of all time. Yes, your budgets are minuscule. It's astonishing just how much damage you can do with a modest amount of money and a compliant media who are on your side.

Fine. You've won this one. You've found the lethal weaknesses in human politics and exploited them. Your children and everyone else's children are going to die because of it. Thanks a lot. We'll put your gravestone on the list of monuments to piss against, along with that lying, torturing, murdering bastard Tony Blair.