So if you are a regular Rush Limbaugh listener - as I am - you heard Rush discussing the approaching Hurricane Irma this past week. And if you were paying attention, as I was, you heard him discuss the quite obvious fact that climate change believers (or science deniers as I call them) would be using Irma - as with Hurricane Harvey and others before that - as evidence of climate change. Aka: global warming.
Well, of course. There seems to be nothing that occurs on Planet Earth that these people will not attribute to climate change. A blizzard or lack of one - climate change. A hot day in July or a cold one in February - climate change. Hurricanes are particularly irresistible for the climate changers.
So it came as no surprise that Rush’s discussion of the obvious was instantly picked up and quite deliberately misrepresented by the liberal media. Over at The Resurgent, Erick Erickson was quick to spot the game being played. His headline:
Everybody Freaked the Hell Out Over Rush Limbaugh Yesterday, But He Was Right
Wrote Erick in part:
He said nothing unreasonable and much on point. His overarching point, for those who do not or did not listen, is that when even the computer models were showing Irma was going to turn north and go up the eastern seaboard, people were making a run on water in Florida. It was not a casual stocking up of supplies, but a panicked run on grocery stores led by media and advertising designed to induce fear.
And what disappeared first? Water. Bottled water disappeared when, right now, the water flows drinkably through the pipes of South Florida residences.
Rush is right. The media has so invested for so long in the global warming scenario that promised more frequent and bigger hurricanes without ever delivering them, they are right now positively orgasmic that a big storm is coming. It is their “I told you so” moment after two decades of telling us so to no avail. Local TV stations and national networks have ramped up the coverage and it is not coverage keeping people informed, but coverage decided to say ‘I told you so’ and ‘you’re all going to die.’
Rush also said this in response to a call from a listener named Owen:
I’m telling you Al Gore and his acolytes after Hurricane Katrina took the occasion of Hurricane Katrina and all of that suffering and all of that misery. They’re the ones that started warning everybody that Katrina was just the first of many. We were gonna have more and more hurricanes like Katrina, and they’re gonna be stronger and stronger because of climate change. I just listened, Owen. That’s all I did.
And then 12 years went by, and there was not a single major hurricane — that’s Category 3 or above — that hit the continental United States for 12 years. It is undeniable. Algore was wrong, just like he’s wrong about practically everything. But just like Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb in 1976 was wrong about everything, and yet he’s still a revered acolyte in the eco-zombie movement, just like Al Gore is.”
Pretty crystal clear, yes? The point is obvious. The - as Rush calls them - “environmentalist wackos” - go wild when something like Irma happens because they can use it to say “see I told you so.” But when something like Irma doesn’t happen - they say it anyway because they are not about science they are about a political agenda.
Here are some of the nuttier versions of what the liberal media was saying about Rush’s comments, beginning with The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers:
Rush Limbaugh indicates he’s evacuating Palm Beach days after suggesting Hurricane Irma is fake news
Say what? I never once heard Rush say that the Hurricane Irma was “fake news”. What show was Borchers listening to? He then went on to say this of Rush’s comments:
To state the obvious, these are potentially dangerous comments from Limbaugh, who is based in Palm Beach, Fla. He is encouraging listeners who might be in Irma's path not to take seriously the official guidance disseminated through the media.
‘I wish that not everything that involved news had become corrupted and politicized, but it just has,’ he said.”
More broadly, Limbaugh's bad advice reveals the metastasizing nature of “fake news” attacks on the press, which have been led by President Trump. How did we get from Trump's claim that he has “never seen more dishonest media than, frankly, the political media” to the idea that weather reports are phony, too?
How's that? At no time did Rush ever say “not to take seriously” what is being said by the “official guidance.” What he did do is point to the hysteria that results in things like a run on bottled water when in fact, for all of that time involved, people had 100 percent access to, yes, clean water. Water in their own house coming from a kitchen or bathroom tap. All they had to do was fill up some bottles themselves and - presto- they have clean water to drink. Instead there is a mad rush to buy bottled water - a panic. This would seem like starkly obvious advice. But not, apparently, if you are a liberal.
But of course Borchers quickly reveals his hand when he steers the column to President Trump. And says that Rush is saying of weather reports what the President frequently says of the political media - that they “are phony too.” In other words: its all about Trump too.
Then there’s the Today show’s Al Roker who tweeted this:
Astonishing, no? There is a prominent weather personality just flat out making it up. Or lying, to be impolite about it.
One could go on. But Rush’s central point here was clear. Climate change supporters are possessed with using any weather event as evidence of global warming. Even as they have been unable to predict with accuracy the path of Irma several days out they insist they can tell you with certainty the sea level 100 years from now.
What is abundantly obvious yet again is that Rush Limbaugh has called this with rather accurately. The liberal media has a political agenda - and they will use anything, including a hurricane - to advance it.
