Returning the smear of the warmists

Everyone knows how nasty "McCarthyite" tactics are -- everyone knows because collectivists never tire of letting us know how evil it was for Joe McCarthy to launch witch-hunts and campaigns of intimidation against people on the basis simply of whom they associate with, smearing their character and credibility and insinuating a "guilt by association" that "infected" American politics for generations afterwards.

As Robert Bidinotto notes, those same tactics are now used regularly by the collectivists themselves. His example is the ad hominem assault on global warming skeptics; he recounts how professional scientists have had their credibility laid to waste by hatchet-jobs that barely merit the recounting -- except that these are hatchet-jobs that you'll see splashed across your news headlines every day.

"Exxon Mobil!" "A hired gun for the oil industry!" "Denier!" Leaving aside the basic logical error of the ad hominem attack - that in attacking the arguer the argument itself is left unchallenged -- Bidinotto instead cries havoc, and lets slip the McCarthyite attack dogs himself. "Okay, let's play the same game," he says, "and see if these attack dogs like it."

At the head of this pack we find the Union of Concerned Scientists, a pseudo-scientific advocacy group with a long pedigree of radical leftist activism, and whose own funders include virtually the entire funding apparatus of the agenda-driven American left. Joining them is that bastion of sober scientific research and thought, Greenpeace. We find a political hack, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who, in the Joe McCarthy tradition, launches a political-legal witch hunt and campaign of intimidation, suing oil companies "to disclose their dealings with climate change skeptics" -- and First Amendment be damned.

All of this coercion and smearing is clearly meant to frighten into silence any legitimate scientists who challenge Gang Green.

Question: If the scientific evidence supporting the Gang's claims about climate change were so overwhelming, irrefutable, and convincing, why these goon-squad tactics to shut down dissent? What are these people afraid of?

That's the question I find so interesting. If you do have the evidence, why wouldn't you simply rest on it?

LINK: The ad hominem assault on global warming critics - Robert Bidinotto

RELATED: Politics, Politics-US, Science, Global Warming