Two con men unite for Mother Earth. This could rank as the nadir of global warming advocacy if we didn’t know in our hearts that a hoax of such magnitude will never stop plumbing to new lows.
We’re talking about the joint appearance of two notorious hucksters, lounging beach-side on a comfy sofa as gentle waves sparkle in the background. The Reverends Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson, smirking as self-consciously as undertakers caught rifling through the pockets of the recently deceased, have joined together to urge Americans to cast aside their petty squabbles and link arms to heal Mother Earth. Their faux folksy chatter fades into the soothing sounds of the placid seashore while a voice from on high exhorts the viewer to solve the "climate crisis" by going to a web site.
The 30 second ad, running on television stations throughout the US, comes from the We Can Solve The Climate Crisis campaign, which is a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection, which is the brainchild of Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore. The alliance is a nonprofit venture as befits the former vice president whose vision, passion, and doggone determination are finally bearing fuit eight years after he abandoned the pursuit of political power to take on the more important task of enlightening the apathetic masses to the fiery cauldron in which we will boil lest we change our selfish ways. Polite people will ignore that the Nobel laureate’s personal fortune has grown by around $100-million during his time in the wilderness.
Back to the reverends (pictured: Al Sharpton left, Pat Robertson right.) No agenda or ideology more warrants the endorsement of these two grifters than the global warming hoax. Sharpton and Robertson have sullied America for decades as they promote themselves with a zeal unmatched since Houdini. They are as slippery as that showman as they move from one monumental gaff to another without missing a beat.
Al Sharpton is best known as the cheerleader for the Tawana Brawley hoax back in the late 80s. After a teenage African American girl claimed she had been raped and defiled by a gang of white men, some of them police officers, Al grabbed his megaphone and traversed the TV studios of the country demanding justice. After seven months of examining police and medical records a grand jury determined that the girl had made up the story of rape to avoid punishment for staying out too late. Sharpton responded by accusing the county prosecutor of racism and also of being one of the gang that violated the girl. The prosecutor sued for libel and won.
At least no one died during the Brawley debacle, unlike at the Freddie’s Fashion Mart riot, when Sharpton whipped up a mob with the false accusation that a Jew had evicted a black businessman. The protest became a tragedy when one of the mob stormed the Jewish tenant’s business brandishing a gun and flammable liquid. Seven store employees died of smoke inhalation and the racially enraged perpetrator shot himself.
Throughout the years, before and after these two sad incidents, right up to the inflammatory Duke Lacrosse phony rape charge two years ago, riots, turmoil and hate have whirled about Sharpton, who has yet to apologize for the pain and suffering he has promoted.
Compared to the Reverend Sharpton, the Reverend Robertson is a paragon of probity, but he’s a huckster by another measure. While insufferably oleaginous, especially when contrasted with Sharpton’s perverse charm, Reverend Pat isn’t culpable for anyone’s early demise, although not from lack of ill will.
A pioneer in the wildly lucrative televangelist wave, Robertson grew enormously rich by milking millions of guilt-stricken Americans longing for an easy absolution. Where Sharpton traffics in false accusations Robertson traffics in predictions. In 1976 he predicted that the earth would end in 1982 as Jesus returned to inflict his judgment on a sinful world. Undeterred by the new years that keep rolling in, he continues regularly to predict cataclysms, both man-made and natural, that will cause massive death and destruction. Last year the United States faced a nuclear attack while 2008 will be a year of worldwide violence. Should a destructive hurricane, one of Reverend Pat’s favorite apocalyptic horsemen, head towards the eastern seaboard, the best place to seek shelter will be Virginia Beach, VA, the location of his headquarters. In 1985 Robertson prayed to God to alter Hurricane Gloria’s course and thus it was done, sparing Virginia Beach but inflicting billions of dollars in damages to nearby areas. Robertson’s pipeline to God was clogged 10 years later when Virginia Beach was extensively damaged by Hurricane Felix.
Robertson’s sparse success as a prophet provides amusement but his propensity to denigrate, insult, slander and demean people and groups that don’t meet with his approval gets him in hot water. Jews, Hindus, Episcopalians, Catholics, Muslims, women, gays are only a sampling of those who ignite Robertson’s ire. Remarks of his after September 11, in which he and another man of God appeared to blame the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon on the sinfulness of America, were as distasteful as those offered by anti-smoking fanatic Stanton Glantz that that day’s death toll paled in comparison to that caused by Big Tobacco.
In a sane country the Reverends Robertson and Sharpton would be pariahs, relegated to the fever swamps inhabited by lunatics and bigots. In the USA of today they regularly trot on stage to provide the sick entertainment that passes for news and views. Even in these decadent times, however, they are beyond the pale for inclusion in legitimate organizations. That these two reprobates are honored spokesmen for the "climate crisis" tells us all we need to know about the campaign to transform the masses into global warming acolytes, mindlessly parroting the lies espoused by charlatans seeking to make a buck off a non-existent problem by driving whole populations to the poor house. Judged by the company it keeps, the global warming hoax is damned.
Link to video: The Reverends Lay Down the Global Warming Law
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