Heartland Institute: The ‘Gate’ Scandal That Never Was
February 17, 2012 | Filed Under Barack Obama, Climate Change, Democrats/Leftists, Education, Environment, Ethics, Global Warming, Government, Liberals, Media, Media Bias, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Warner Todd Huston | Comments Off
-By Warner Todd Huston
Global warmists finally have an email “gate” of their own that they can turn against “deniers” and they are taking full advantage of it. The Warmists are excited that the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based state policy group, has been “outed” for attempting to undermine the religiously held tenets of global warming. Emails to that effect are claimed to have been leaked from this group and the warmists as well as their handmaidens in the Old Media are touting this scandal as proof of… well, it’s a bit hard to discern what it is proof of. In fact, it isn’t “proof” of much of anything, really.
For one thing the documents are fakes, but even if they weren’t… so what?
For quite some time, for instance, Chicago’s Heartland Institute has been holding events, debates, and seminars on the hoax of global warming. The Heartland Institute has an entire section of its website dedicated to debunking global warming and it has produced books and pamphlets attacking the false “consensus” of man-made global warming. Without question, global warming (a quasi religious belief I personally call globabloney) has been a major focus at Heartland for a long time, to be sure.
That being understood — not only understood but glaringly obvious — leaked emails that purport to show that Heartland has a plan to influence lawmakers, scientists, members of the media, and even schools against global warming is a bit of a “well, duh!” Any ten seconds of time spent on the Institute’s website would tend to make it clear that they are against claims of man-made global warming. At some point, even if the documents were real it should not come as any sort of shocking revelation.
So, why would these so-called leaked emails be such a big story? Well, really for only one reason: to give a helping hand to the high priests of global warming who were a few years ago stung by climategate, a scandal that did, indeed, reveal through leaked emails that warmists were lying about their flawed research and attempting to cajole others to support their lies.
We need but turn to Politico to see how the media is trying to turn these Heartland emails into the equivalent of climategate in order to somehow prove that anti-warmists are just as bad as the climategate scientists. Note the headline in a piece by Politico’s Darren Samuelson entitled, “Heartland Burned by ‘DenialGate’ Memos..” You can almost hear the glee in that headline, can’t you?
Politico isn’t the only outlet coming to the aide of the globalwarming religionists. The New York Times posted a piece similarly headlined as Politico’s. For the Times on February 15 Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman gave us “Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science.”
Notice how the Times characterizes the story as an attack on the “science” of global warming? The Times casts Heartland in the role as monster that needs to be destroyed.
But as I alluded to, there is a major problem with these supposed emails from Heartland. It appears they have been faked. This is quite unlike the climategate emails that were all too real.
Even The Atlantic, no right-wing rag there, reports that some of the documents are fakes. The Times notes that Heartland says the documents are fakes but decides that Heartland is lying, the Times essentially claiming that the documents are too good not to be true.
According to the Heartland Institute, the documents are simply false. Some, though, appear to have been altered from actual Heartland documents that were stolen from them.
As Heartland explains it:
The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.
Again, this is all quite unlike climategate because the lies and schemes of the warmists were all completely true.
Truth, though, is not on the menu for the left-wing journalists that are so happy to see an email gate that they can use against those that know that global warming is neither man-made and that there isn’t anything we mere humans can do about the weather.
Look for this story to perhaps grow with more left-wingers attempting to use it as a weapon in the global warmist’s arsenal of falsities.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
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