On Lies

At Cold Fury, Mike asks the question that I broached yesterday with regard to Sarah Palin: If she’s such a terrible person, why is it necessary to invent unflattering fictions about her behavior? Shouldn’t the unvarnished truth indict her sufficiently, as it does, say, Charles Rangel? It’s really the same question that I’ve continually placed before the climate alarmists. If the science is overwhelmingly in their favor, as they always claim, then why is it necessary to regale us with tall tales of melting glaciers and disappearing sea ice and declining polar bear populations, and doom-speaking scenarii of rising seas, to confabulate tales of increasing hurricane activity, to eliminate evidences of the medieval warming period, to lose key data and to suppress other data, to rig the peer-review process, to use heat island data as a proxy for locations that lie outside of cities, to jigger algorithms to provide processed data congenial to one’s purposes?

Despite what Charles Johnson may claim, this is not science. Without proper sharing of the raw data and the algorithms, it’s not falsifiable. If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not verifiable. If it’s not verifiable, it’s not science, no matter what the fraudulent boffins might say.

The CBO claims that it cannot score the Senate’s health care reform plan, because it is too vague. They’re the non-partisan organization entrusted with calculating the costs associated with proposed programs. The vagueness is part of the administration’s calculation: they want a bill pushed through that gives their unelected brain trust the opportunity to write as much of the legislation ex post facto as possible. So, apart from reneging on promises of transparency in the process, the administration is counting on the legislature to abdicate some of its responsibility for legislating in favor of the executive, setting aside for the moment the issues of reconciliation itself. This thwarts the intention of the Constitution, namely, that those who make law shall be as immediately responsible to the electorate as possible. I hope the analogy to the IPCC and its feeder entities is apparent.

I’m sorry, but if the legislation in its final form is beyond the understanding of the voter, it is merely unacceptable. The administration claims that it’s their failure properly to explain the bill to us that’s behind its unpopularity. In fact, it cannot even give a straightforward account of its outcomes, now saying that under any circumstances you’ll be able to keep your physician, now perhaps not, that you’ll be able to keep your coverage, but only if you don’t in any way change it.

If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable. It’s akin to the claim that they haven’t raised taxes on 95% of the public. When you run up enormous deficits that the taxpayer is accountable for, you increase taxes. Perhaps not now, but certainly in the future. The jobs boondoggles are boondoggles because the vast majority of Obama’s advisers have no business acumen, never having been in business. Their backgrounds are in such follies as ACORN, where failure is never failure until the flow of government largesse is stopped. In the business world, institutions that do not manage their affairs and observe the law eventually go away. In ObamaWorld, they simply rename themselves.

And I mention this too, because as The Rhetorican notes, it appears that certain Congresscritters and media outlets have found it necessary to misrepresent Toyota’s supposed accelerator malfunctions. There’s a history of this kind of expose gone staged. I wonder if those who claim that because James O’Keefe spliced in pictures of himself in pimp gear that he didn’t actually wear into ACORN offices, he didn’t represent himself as a pimp will find similar dudgeon to expend on ABC.

Just don’t lie to us, you assholes: we’re not as stupid as you seem to believe, and as a corollary, you’re really far from as smart as you think you are. And to Cass Sunstein, who thinks that the internet needs to be strictly monitored in order to prevent undue skepticism of the government . . . fuck you.