When You Rig the Outcome, You Don’t Have to Say You’re Sorry

Gore and Junk Science

I have only driven 20 miles this morning, but I presume you are as surprised as I that planet earth still is ticking.

Didn’t the aptly named ghoulish Al Gore predict in his worldwide weekend television special, “Boo! Gotcha, Didn’t I?” that the world soon would end because Republicans have not adopted enough seals? Or have they adopted too many spotted owls?

By hysterically mixing sober environmental sensitivity with global warming junk science, is it any wonder that only liberals believe Mr. Gore’s global warming gobbledy gook?

Tripping up a Liberal Every Time

There probably is a spot of evidence to support some global warming claims. But liberals are like old prostitutes. Having no faith in their audience’s ability to think, liberals believe they must exaggerate in order to convince.

Here is the key to Mr. Gore’s overwhelming marketing success: When he presents global warming as a phony crisis, it is just blurry enough, sufficiently strategically imprecise, to appeal to the emotions-first crowd.

Like a medicine man, he selectively uses facts as emotional fig leaves rather than to intellectually fortify his case. Mr. Gore is going for the howl reaction instead of reflective chin-stroking. I digress.

I yearn for the days when you could open a newspaper and be reasonably assured that a news story is an approximate recreation of events, not a shiv in the back by an agenda-driven journalist.

Herewith is a gem from the jewelry case of The New York Times.

My candidate for the most disheartening Gotcha! story of the past week appeared last Wednesday in The New York Times. Datelined London, it was written by the passionately liberal Alan Cowell, chief of the Times’s London bureau for years. At 50 years old, Mr. Cowell is one of the newspaper’s most reliable Lefties with his slanted reporting.

Leading the Naysayers

Background: Since 2001, The New York Times has steadfastly held that the War on Terror is a figment of President Bush’s mind. Fantasy. A political ploy.

Back to our story: Mr. Cowell wrote what the Times calls a “news analysis,” meaning a gadget for promoting the newspaper’s opinion, which, coincidentally, is the reporter’s. In this case, the headline did its job, telling the story: “Brown’s Reaction to Terrorist Threat, So Different From Blair’s, Reassures Many.”

Ever since 9/11, the Times has led an anti-Blair charge, scoring the deposed British Prime Minister Tony Blair for too cozily aligning himself with President Bush on the Iraq War. Pointedly, the Times has downplayed acts of terror the same way its kid brother, the Los Angeles Times, has.

A weekend ago, you will recall there were two near-miss terror strikes by another gang of lunatic Muslim medical types.

Fitting the Times’s Thesis

When Gordon Brown, Mr. Blair’s newly appointed successor, reacted more mutedly than Mr. Blair ever did to a terrorist threat, Mr. Cowell thought that was swell.

He exploded into a frenzy of nearly uncontrollable drooling.

Survey Looks a Little Rigged

Smarmy, They Call It

The Brown shrug-off fits like a glove into Mr. Cowell’s personal beliefs and, more importantly, into The New York Times’s conviction that the War on Terror is merely fodder for Republican fraidy cats.

As for the four persons Mr. Cowell quoted to support his Terror Is Baloney theory:

He led off with the Leftist Times of London, (the British political equivalent of The New York Times or the Washington Post), citing the columnist Peter Riddell, a longtime Blair critic. Fair enough.

Then Mr. Cowell becomes sloppy.

His other two news sources are farther left than most of the U.S. or Britain, which, ahem, he neglects to point out.

As a matter of policy, the Times rarely identifies far Left groups as left-wing. Conservative groups, conversely, are routinely labeled, to distinguish them from the liberal mainstream.

The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times make a daily practice of corrupting the language. In recent days, they have changed another controversial policy. The newspapers have taken to calling Muslim terrorists “fighters,” having discarded the previous soft label of “militant.”

Is Shami a Sham?

Returning to Mr. Cowell, for his second source he quotes a pip of a lady, one Shami Chakrabarti, a 38-year-old radical.

Ms. Chakrabarti has earned her bread since 9/11 opposing all anti-terrorism legislation.

Sort of a Cindy Sheehan with shoes and socks on.

She is the public face of a dandy 73-year-old group called the National Council for Civil Liberties, a far Left equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union. Ms. Chakrabarti has been called “an anarchist in a barrister’s wig.”

A Joke on Us or Her?

How is this for irony: Ms. Chakrabarti joined the National Council, also known as Liberty (to show they have a sense of humor, I presume), on Sept. 10, 2001.

Not surprisingly, the little lady with the large mouth is a regular contributor to two of the far Left media icons in England, the BBC and the newspaper The Independent.

The third source for the angry Mr. Cowell — formerly of the far Left and unreliable news organization Reuters — was the leader of England’s opposition party. You expected a bouquet of roses from this chap?

Ever Hear of Objectivity?

Finally, in Mr. Cowell’s search for the “objective” truth about how his country really feels about new Prime Minister Brown, he turned to the most radical daily newspaper in the English language, London’s The Guardian, for the views of still another sympathetic copy-cat lefty, one Jackie Ashley.

This, dear reader, is how you stitch together a propaganda piece and pass it off as “news analysis.”

Too Many Broths Spoil the Cooke

Take Culver City.

I imagine if you rounded up all of the ex-cops who say Ted Cooke mistreated them while they were on the Culver City Police Dept., Mr. Cooke would emerge smelling as foully as Mr. Blair did in Mr. Cowell’s screed.

In Mr. Cooke’s case and in Mr. Cowell’s foot-stomping piece, the conclusions would qualify as colorful — but just not journalism.