HOW DARE YOU! Shame on the Liberals Who Use Greta Thunberg as a Human Shield. This Jim Treacher post is behind the PJ VIP paywall (please join!) but here’s the key point:

I would prefer if Trump didn’t tweet mean things about her, and I’m not going to tell anybody not to scold him for it. Go right ahead. But if all these adults are going to hide behind a child to push their political agenda, she’s going to get some pushback.

In fact, they know she will. They’re counting on it. That’s the whole idea. They love that Trump is yelling at her. He’s playing right into their hands.

It’s the bread and butter play in the left’s playbook, and partly explains why they love their “mascots of the anointed,” as Thomas Sowell dubbed them in The Vision of the Anointed. The media declared Jon Stewart to be the second coming of H.L. Mencken, but if anyone criticized him, the clown nose went back on, and the response was “he’s just a comedian.” To criticize Obama was to risk being called a racist, leaving John McCain in the role of the Washington Generals in 2008. And now to criticize Thunberg is to be told “she’s just a kid.” But why would anyone take science advice from a kid? Or as Steve Hayward of Power Line wrote yesterday:

The media is so self-unaware that it cannot conceive that the whole St. Greta phenomenon represents the nadir of the climate crusade. After all, if a Nobel Prize and Academy Award for Al Gore didn’t do the trick, what makes anyone think a 16-year old Swedish girl will cause everyone to sit up and say, “Well, I guess I better buy a Prius now!”

I’m still awaiting a media story that discloses the massive and organized PR operation behind St. Greta. You don’t really think she emerged spontaneously? Who pays for the travel of her retinue, for her hotel rooms and meals, and organizing the public events and other moveable feasts where she appears? I suspect she and her parents (reportedly leftist artists and actors of one kind or another) are banking some nice coin on this whole scene.

But like a teenage rock band, her freshness date may expire quickly. As Treacher notes, “They’re just exploiting her. The minute she’s no longer useful to them, they’ll drop her like a global warming-heated rock. Ask Cindy Sheehan. Ask Sandra Fluke. Ask the Krassenstein brothers. Ask any other one-time liberal superstar who is now long forgotten. It’s a short ride.”

UPDATE: America’s Paper of Record is spot-on: Democrats Introduce Debate Strategy Of Holding Up Small Child Whenever Their Positions Are Challenged.