The hot air Democrats

Wesley Pruden:

You can't blame the Democrats for hurrying to enact their hot-air legislation. The public is finally paying attention, recognizing the global warming crisis for what it is, a giant scam that will cost every American plenty. The globe isn't warming - it's actually cooling, in fact - and there's no crisis.

The only "crisis" Thursday in Washington was what to do with Al Gore. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had invited the ex-veep to Washington to appear Friday with senior Democrats to make a last-minute appeal for votes for the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Note there's not a word about "global" or "warming" in the title of the legislation. Once you stink up perfectly good words, you have to find new ones. (That's why liberals now call themselves "progressives.")

Mrs. Pelosi canceled Al's invitation late Wednesday night because one of his signature rants - "the sky is falling, the earth is melting" - would likely harm, not help her cause. Mrs. Pelosi said she would prefer to have Al making harmless telephone calls from his palatial house in Tennessee, and an aide says she doesn't want him "in the air for five and half hours" when he could be sitting down outside Nashville dialing for votes. (She presumably sent him a prepaid calling card.)

"It's a question of what was energy efficient for the vice president," she said. "We were narrowing the list of undecideds. We had a great narrowing of the undecideds."

Given the size of their margins in Congress, the effort to pass the global warming bill shouldn't even be close. But it is. President Obama, who imagined only yesterday that he could remain royally aloof atop Mount Olympus, parsing his favorite Urdu poetry for Islamic insights, had to step out into 91-degree heat Thursday to make still another pitch to the undecideds.

"We've been talking about this issue for decades," he said. "Now is the time to act." Quickly, before the globe cools even more than it has over the past decade, he didn't dare to say.

...

I suspect they fear losing the opportunity to take credit for the cooling. The Democrats remind me of a guy being chased out of town by a mob who grabs a baton and acts like he is leading a parade.