Snowden Snow Job or Climate Change?

These three posts on a couple of different topics got me thinking about news and what the people believe is true in this internet age.

These two posts are about the same issue, the Snowden Leaks: Political Irony › Snowden Snow Job?: and  Have We All Been Fooled by Snowden?. (The second link has the details but I try to link to Political Irony whenever I can because its a great site.) The third is an unrelated propaganda piece by the evil Charles Krauthammer.  Flat-earther Obama's global-warming folly

The piece on Snowden is questioning whether he might really be a right-wing, anti-Obama type, who hated leakers and didn't care about wiretapping when Bush was in office but has changed his tune now, maybe, just maybe,... to discredit the Obama administration.

He was gung-ho for it when Bush was president. Which brings up an interesting point: his opinion of such programs abruptly changed when Barack Obama took office.

Add this theory to all the other Snowden smear stories from the corporate-government media and its hard know what to believe about his motives.

The Krauthammer piece is propaganda designed to cut on the administration while grabbing the ear of the average Fox news watcher. It includes

Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.

This is written to confuse the issue by cherry-picking the data. Yes, global temperatures have been flat for 16 years but look at these NASA charts and you can see that global temperatures are rising and why the Evil-One picked his 16 year time frame. Also, check out the now infamous George Will's Global Warming 10 year time frame.



So Krauthammer doesn't believe in global warming. We knew, or could have guessed, that. The more important part for this post is the use of "Flat-Earther".

It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.

Global warming believers have called the Global Warming Deniers "Flat-Earthers" for a long time and I believe with good reason (see *** below), but here Krauthammer is trying to turn the tables. I'd expect to see Fox News and other conservative media to run with this by using the term a lot in the next few weeks. If they do, in a few weeks the conservative base will have a new term to use when slamming the Obama or Liberals in general.

Anyway, the point of my post is that in this internet age with so many "news" sources available to the public, the basic aim of any propagandist for any side of any argument is to just confuse the issue with posts like these. Once the competing views are out there, the people are left dazed and confused, not knowing who or what to believe, so,.... they just chose something that supports their own beliefs. No one is any more informed, no discussion is allowed, and we just stay in our own camps hating the other side. I'm not sure a democracy can function in an environment like this.

tnb

*** "Flat-Earther" is generally defined as one who holds beliefs that have generally been discredited by science.

Now, I don't know if global warming is true or not. I'm not a scientist. Neither is Krauthammer. I do trust science and try to keep an open mind about things, so even though there are scientists who don't buy into the Global Warming theories, a large majority of them do [Wikipedia] [Krauthammers own WP]. So,.. I'm not going to cherry pick to confirm my belief. I'm going with those who do study the issue and I think most of them would agree that the term "Flat-Earther" fits Krauthammer, Will and the other Global Warming Deniers much better than it fits Obama.

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