Home Editor's Essays Cough. Cough. Cough. Cough. The President and Al Capone.

Cough. Cough. Cough. Cough. The President and Al Capone.

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[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Faulting President Obama as the Gulf oil spill worsens by the day closely parallels the feds sending Al Capone to prison in 1932 for income tax evasion. The charged blunders were not either man’s worst, by miles.

No Answer Is the Right Answer

The smartest person I know said this morning he is stumped by where to assign blame for the Gulf disaster, which is utterly logical. He does not know whom to fault— BP? The White House? That reliable ol’ standby and veteran Democrat piñata, President Bush?

Or, it could be the worst nightmare of all for secular liberals, an act of God? Not to worry. Liberals will suspect that a Republican deviously planted the idea in God’s mind.

Here we ponder the newest unassailable strawman for liberals. Like “second-hand smoke” — cough, cough — “man-made global warming,” “man-made disasters,” Obamacare and Swish’s weekly mileage vouchers, these foggy, always undisputable and unprovable, scenarios are just vague enough to foist off on select rubes, lying on their backs, mouths wide open, hoping to catch horseflies.

A traditional mantra of the Left with its perennial parade of irrational You’re Gonna Die fads is, “Confuse ‘em with lofty-sounding theories.”

Worrywart liberals thirst daily for the incomparable joy of pressing the “Go” buttons on the backs of the dozens of voodoo bogeymen they like to have in perpetual motion.

Cough, cough.

Why, you may ask, am I almost choking? Because 19 years ago last Friday, I drove through a small, woodsy Northern California community where smoking in restaurants still was permitted. A dastardly smoker was sitting only 21 feet away. I managed to stave off a cough through the ‘90s, but by golly, the filthy residue from that secondhand smoke in 1991 finally caught up with me last Monday just after breakfast.

Cough, cough.

I was confident the nonsensical notion of “secondhand smoke” — which conservatives cannot articulate without a devilish giggle — would stand as the primary Barnum & Bailey hoax of our lifetime until a smart marketing fellow in New York thought up “global warming.” Too bad his name reposes impenetrably deep inside the ashes of history, or we could celebrate this undeniable genius.

“Global warming,” as a stand-alone scare tactic, was so heavily freighted with “boo, gotcha, didn’t I?” hocus-pocus that semi-straight-faced vendors were not enjoying much success until the most worshipped man in the world of fruitcakes took the stage. Ladies and gentleman, the dour, the dopey Al (I Am Going to Scare You but Don’t Worry, Nothing Will Happen, Ever) Gore.

Truth Is, No Need to be True

Selling “global warming” to panting, perspiring rubes from here to Swish’s birthplace turned Gore the Boor into one of the richer men in the world. He demonstrated that naked fraud remains a saleable commodity, even in a supposedly sophisticated world.

Devoutly, the sly, rapid-talking wink-winkers from the — cough, cough — environmental movement who had convinced the dumbest earthlings they could find that — cough, cough — secondhand smoke was a genuine killer, found it a cinch to duplicate their universal triumph. They — cough, cough — sold “global warming” merely by mimicking the same darned blueprint:

Convert a few rubes, and boys, the snowball effect takes over. All you have to do is get out of the way. An avalanche of ignorant true believers pours through an opening that need be no larger than a keyhole, so boundlessly aggressive is their zeal.

Secondhand smoke, you may recall, faded into outer space — cough, cough — as soon as the next sucker fad could be thought up.

Nobody came within a hundred miles of proving the preposterous proposition, just as no one has come within a century of proving that “manmade global warming” is one stick different from the atmosphere 1,500 years ago.

Pal, if you are selling, there always is a quorum of rubes eager to buy. Then just step aside and let the latest Stampede of the Stupid have its away, until it runs out of fad gas.