Public Nuisances
Tyrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PublIc NuIsaNces R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The democrats’ sham energy bill WASHINGTON When house democrats appeared to reverse their long-standing ban on offshore oil drilling, the...
...Officers who had fought alongside him served up evidence that his exploits were embellished and sometimes completely made up...
...Environmental groups resorted to the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act to ensnarl all 487 leases in court challenges...
...Democrats uneasily holding on to seats in otherwise conservative districts would be placated...
...Speaker Pelosi’s ruse was endangering too many of her Democratic colleagues...
...Moreover, she obviously has more executive experience than the Democratic presidential candidate...
...They cast doubt on his medals and most damningly reminded us that in testimony on Capitol Hill Kerry accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes...
...And the electorate would be duped...
...Further oil drilling will be delayed in the courts for years to come...
...Like all other thoughtful observers of American media, Taranto recognizes that they are heavily biased toward the Democratic Party and the left in general...
...Thus the Speaker relented and notified endangered House Democrats with fragile election margins that they could publicly endorse offshore drilling...
...Perhaps the Republicans and a few Democratic allies can show similar cleverness in beginning drilling now...
...In February 2008, the government issued 487 oil leases for drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea...
...The voters agreed...
...Now the Taranto Principle can be seen in the reporting on Governor Sarah Palin...
...The vets’ assault on Kerry is now called “Swift Boating” by left-wingers and journalists alike, who insist the vets’ charges were “lies,” though four years later it is apparent that the so-called lies composed an accurate rendering of blowhard Kerry’s war record...
...Similar ingenuity can be employed today...
...We know of politicians who depend on the teleprompter for fluency...
...The bill that Democrats with a wink to environmentalists approved and Republicans voted against needs provisions to allow drilling to proceed now...
...Very curious...
...At least, the Democratic leadership hoped the electorate was hoodwinked...
...They know what Pelosi knows...
...What is the Taranto Principle...
...Ostensibly the bill will allow drilling as close to our shores as 50 miles in the Atlantic and the Pacific...
...The Taranto Principle WASHINGTON Years from now, in journalism schools, they will call it the “Taranto Principle...
...Perhaps if he had served as mayor in a small town he would have gotten over this revealing disorder...
...But through all the shenanigans Pelosi’s bill will not bring us more oil, for a reason that her environmental allies per 82 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 fectly well understand...
...According to Taranto, in 2004 the media quietly went along with Senator Jean-Francois Kerry’s exaggerated claims to heroism and military prowess, thus encouraging his braggadocio and leaving him utterly unprepared when his fellow vets stepped forward and demonstrated that he had been a dreadful showoff in Vietnam...
...The amalgamation of all this indignation is today called “The Blogosphere...
...In the future, the great republic may only have blog schools, where students are taught to sit in their underwear in front of their luminescent laptops and pound out semi-literate diktats to an—for the most part— unobservant world...
...Very simply, the bill should have included a provision that would gather up all lawsuits challenging all drilling and deposit them into one legal case to be argued before one court...
...Its competing rants are occasionally treated as significant in the media, though lunatics howling on street corners are not...
...According to the Taranto Principle, the media’s failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left’s bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans...
...At least, that is what they will call it if they still have journalism schools years from now...
...Unfortunately, the electorate in this time of exorbitant oil prices is not so easily deceived...
...It is a principle laid down by the Wall Street Journal’s perceptive editorialist James Taranto...
...The vets reproduced the video, video that any journalist could have laid hands on...
...Republicans recognize expanded drilling for oil is a powerful issue working for them in this election year...
...Their allies in the environmental movement have lawsuits in place that will simply stop further drilling...
...If he is not lecturing with his nose in the air he is all uhhs and ahhs...
...Her environmental allies would be placated...
...In August Speaker Nancy Pelosi was beginning to feel the heat from a citizenry angered by high energy prices, particularly high gasoline prices...
...The left-leaning media spoiled Kerry and brought out the worst in him, to the revulsion of enough voters to lose him the election...
...In the past, when the Democratic leadership complained that additional offshore drilling would not produce more domestic oil, they knew whereof they spoke...
...Yet the media have let her experience become a vexed issue...
...That vote will have consequences in this increasingly bizarre election...
...Republicans were clamoring for an expansion in drilling...
...According to this variation of the Taranto Principle, the media circulate infamies that encourage leftists to confect greater infamies, thus causing the defamed candidate to cop the sympathy vote...
...In truth, the Prophet Obama suffers one of the strangest oratorical disabilities I have ever seen in a presidential candidate, to wit: his dependence on the teleprompter...
...Speaker Pelosi has been clever in thwarting the electorate’s desire r. emmeTT Tyrrell, Jr...
...Provisions have been resorted to in the past to get on with oil production during times of emergency...
...In 1973, when faced with an international oil embargo, Congress simply waived environmental laws to allow construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline...
...Meanwhile the press continues to treat the inexperienced and gaffe-prone Senator Barack Obama as though he is the next JFK...
...Even once past a court challenge environmental groups can resort to other legal and bureaucratic roadblocks to hold off the production of oil...
...Her Democrats favored it...
...Republicans generally opposed it...
...Yet, while many hold that this advances the Democratic Party and the left, Taranto believes that it has a harmful effect on leftwing politics, often causing left-wing candidates to lose at the polls...
...That has been ensured by the fact that such organizations as the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and something called Earthjustice (I am told it is basically a nudist outfit with a few butterfly collectors thrown in, possibly nude butterfly collectors) have already filed hundreds of lawsuits to block further drilling...
...Among the howlers is the presumption that he is an orator of great gifts, as JFK was an orator of great gifts...
...As a former mayor and sitting governor, she has about as much experience as former president Jimmy Carter had in 1976...
...Taranto, in his column “Best of the Web Today,” surveys the media and reports daily on their output with special emphasis on their contradictions, hypocrisies, and—most deliciously—imbecilities...
...The consequence of this is that Governor Palin is running away with the women’s vote and doubtless picking up sympathetic men also...
...An idiot comedy show portrayed her daughter and husband in an incestuous affair...
...Her fallback position was that, midst the clamor for drilling, she would simply not allow a drilling bill to come up for a vote on the House floor...
...November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 83...
...Thus she resorted to Plan B. She relented and allowed a drilling bill to come to the floor for a vote...
...Senator Obama, however, relies on a teleprompter so that he will not be heard talking down to the electorate...
...Worse, at the highest level of media she has been subjected to unwarranted scurrilities that are without precedent in a presidential election...
...What is more, it will supposedly finance development of alternative energy sources...
...for offshore drilling—some 70 to 80 percent favor it...
...PublIc NuIsaNces R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Thus in the aftermath of its passage, as marginal Democrats breathed relief for their endangered seats, few environmentalists were heard complaining...
...The democrats’ sham energy bill WASHINGTON When house democrats appeared to reverse their long-standing ban on offshore oil drilling, the electorate was again hoodwinked...
...Voters paying record-high oil prices in a country where long drives to work are often mandatory favor expanded oil drilling...
...Had the media treated his initial boasts with some skepticism, he might have been better prepared for the vets’ response...
Vol. 41 • November 2008 • No. 9
