FREUD CALLED IT DISPLACEMENT: Frank Bruni of the New York Times tut-tuts against “The Exploitation of Paris,” in a piece that could easily have been written by doing a find-and-replace search of a thousand different Times articles written immediately after 9/11. (A period in which the Times was utterly obsessed with the terrorist dangers of all-male golf courses). Along the way, Bruni name-checks Roger Simon, PJM’s boss emeritus:
I woke Saturday morning to Paris-pegged commentary about not just gun control and free speech on American campuses but also climate change—yes, climate change—and of course immigration, albeit to the United States, not France.
What does Paris have to do with climate change?
Well, apparently President Obama’s justly profound concern about rising temperatures is proof of his inadequate attention to terrorism and an indictment of his ability to do triage overall.
Or so I gather from a column written by Roger L. Simon for PJ Media. Simon characterized Obama as “a ludicrous man who thinks the world’s greatest problem is climate change in the face of Islamic terror.”
Does battling the latter prohibit battling the former?
Pretty much, yeah. As Julia Gorin explained nearly a decade ago in the Christian Science Monitor, “Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you:”
While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that’s coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront “climate change,” which only requires spending trillions of other people’s dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees – they think money grows on them.
Actually, they were right about that last item, at least in terms of fleecing taxpayer money for implausible crony socialism projects, as we would discover starting in 2009:
In a video appearance from 2009, venture capitalist Paul Holland — who had given the maximum legal contribution to Obama, and whose companies received over 6 million in government dollars — described his feelings when heard about the billions up for grabs.
“He came in to do his talk and opened his talk with, ‘I’m Matt Rogers I am the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Energy and I have $134 billion that I have to disperse between now and the end of December,’” Holland told the audience. “So upon hearing that I sent an email to my partners that said Matt Rogers is about to get treated like a hooker dropped into a prison exercise yard.”
Holland continued: “And I had the lack of judgment to go up and share that with him and the other people who were all standing around him…Fortunately for me they all laughed and thought it was funny.”
As Red State’s Moe Lane wrote at the time in response: “Oh, I’m sure that it was hysterical:”
I always enjoy it myself when parasites talk so cavalierly about the government urinating away billions of tax dollars that my two kids are going to have to figure out eventually how to pay for. Particularly when it involves ‘supporting’ ‘green’ ‘initiatives;’ although I am forced to admit that, based on Obama’s current track record, the very word ‘green’ will be as about as popular a political adjective by the time the man leaves office as ‘liberal’ is now.
Seriously, if you encounter the President and he wants to help you out on a public relations exercise, run. One of the things that they don’t mention about the Midas touch is the radioactivity…
Back in 2000, Bruni’s New York Times sniffed, “it does not take a scientist to size up the effects of snowless winters on the children too young to remember the record-setting blizzards of 1996. For them, the pleasures of sledding and snowball fights are as out-of-date as hoop-rolling, and the delight of a snow day off from school is unknown.” 11 years later, when New York City snowplows were caught unprepared for about ten feet of — insert clip of Wallace Shawn’s Vizzini shouting “inconceivable!!! here — white powdery global warming, Victor Davis Hanson coined the phrase “The Bloomberg Syndrome:”
It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.
The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.
Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.
And presidents announcing that ISIS has been contained on national TV only hours before they attack a major European city — because he doesn’t consider them as big a threat to the world as global warming.
No really — just ask him: “No challenge poses a greater threat to our future than climate change,” he’s claimed on numerous occasions.
Incidentally, doesn’t “exploiting” Paris have the presidential seal of the approval? After all, a month and a half ago, as a headline at Democrat house organ The Hill noted, Obama trumpeted that “Mass shootings are ‘something we should politicize.’”
Fair enough – and since, as legendary sociologist Piers Morgan observed last night, the terrorists aren’t “real Muslims,” shouldn’t we take up the president’s advice as well?