Hot on the heels of the assault by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and Arizona Representative Raul Grijalva against climate change skeptic scientists by demanding their academic institutions reveal who is funding their work, President Barack Obama has mounted a companion attack campaign against climate skeptics in Congress.
Obama ordered his “independent,” IRS registered, 501(c)(4) community organizing project, Organizing for Action, to “put together a site highlighting deniers across the country, and the impact of climate change on your state,” as indicated in a personal email from the president.
His Organizing for Action website shows a grid with pictures of 161 Republican senators and representatives, each labeled “DENIER,” above a “call them out” button that leads to a “bill of indictment”-style page. There we find stories of climate disasters envisioned in the accused’s states (with the utter certainty that bad weather – but not good – is proven to be manmade) with links to send a pious message by Twitter, Facebook or email.
The president’s pitch line said, “This shouldn’t be a controversial opinion. We need to listen to our friends at NASA and the 97 percent of climate scientists who agree that climate change is real, man-made, and happening right now.”
“We need to listen to our friends…” That’s a call for belief, conformity and zeal. It’s clearly a political policy pitch, not “social welfare” as IRS rules require for 501(c)(4) groups.
As the New York Times said, applicants for 501(c)(4) status need to be “asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are ‘social welfare’ organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.” The NYT was talking about Tea Party groups, but did say the rules “should be applied across the board,” including pro-Obama groups. An activist president telling us we need to listen to those who toe the Democratic Party line isn’t social welfare.
It gets worse. Obama’s email kicker line was, “OFA’s mission is holding climate change deniers’ feet to the fire,” perhaps evocative of burning at the stake. That’s not social welfare, it’s zeal raised to fanaticism, and that’s social warfare. We can fervently hope that “believe or die” will not follow from such provocation.
The Orwellian implications are chilling, but all-out social war to eradicate policy opposition is to be expected of Obama in the run-up to his big December legacy fest in Paris, France, the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Nothing should come as a surprise from Obama’s social war machine for the months before Paris.
1 comment:
Obama has earned the first "Chicken Little" award. It was going to go to Al Gore........but he is becoming more and more harmless everyday.
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