IN THIS CASE, UNFORTUNATELY, IT'S BOTH

There's an old saying that it takes one to know one.

So it's a rare day when we would say anything favorable about the editorial staff at the WSJ especially in their zeal for all the wrong reasons to deny Trump should he legitimately gather the necessary votes to win nomination.

Once again we're not supporters.

But there's no shortage of zealots afoot, all at the ready to push their version of their perceived wisdom down your gullet. And one of the most obnoxious and most dangerous is Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

Apparently, the good public servant who spends much of his time genuflecting at the alter of climate change rather than doing his job of serving the people of the tiniest speck on the continent got into a urinating match with the WSJ over the Senator's religion, climate change, and the RICO Act.

Now the Senator suffers from a common malady known as former attorneys general syndrome, you know the kind, the ones who are constantly trying to twist laws that were passed for one reason and use them to ensnare others by broadening their definition without the consent of the public. It's called how dare you differ with my truth.

You can always tell a zealot; they never pass the smell test. It's funny. Even the quasi-government agency called the FDA rallies against physicians who use drugs that were approved for one reason but are indiscriminately used for others not FDA sanctioned. It's a safe bet the good Senator most likely approves of those actions.

Now the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act was passed to go after the so-called bad guys like thugs and mobsters, mafia guys who were successfully evading prosecution under laws already on the books. Apparently, Senator Whitehouse believes it should now be applied scientists and editorialists--not to mention ordinary folks--who question the validity of climate change.

The WSJ called him out for trying "to 'stifle' political and scientific debate." Mr. Whitehouse apparently has suggested such to the Department of Justice. Here are Whitehouse's own words from a recent rant on the subject at Huffington Puff.  Read it for yourself. While you're reading it note his use of the term similarities of the two examples he cites.

As someone who spent a good part of a professional career trying to get people off cigarettes even to the point of getting them banned from Federal Medical Centers where they were sold at deep discounts from the public market place, for Mr. Whitehouse to claim anyone who questioned the Surgeon General's data or questioned what was really a public stick-up of a major industry wasn't singled out is what your mother use to wash your mouth out with soap for telling.

We note this because this is what dangerous zealots do, twist facts, revise history. Senator Whitehouse likes to recall some quotes from the past. Well, here's a few for him from the same periods. Recall, too, until recently it was labeled global warming, a quite specific term before it was conveniently changed.

"The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations. It has already made food and fuel more precious, thus increasing the price of everything we buy. If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000."
–Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976.

The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply 
that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of 
wholesale death and misery for mankind."
–Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist and producer of scientific television documentaries, 
"In the Grip of a New Ice Age," International Wildlife, July 1975.

I believe that increasing global air pollution, through its effect on the reflectivity of the earth, is currently dominant and is responsible for the temperature decline of the past decade or two" Reid Bryson, "Environmental Roulette, Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man, John P. Holdren and Paul R. Ehrlich, eds., 1971.

At this point, the world's climatologists are agreed..Once the freeze starts, it will be too late."
–Douglas Colligan, "Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age," Science Digest, February 1973.

You should also note here that Paul R. Ehrlich is the Stanford professor who made a public television bet he lost but never paid about famines caused by population explosion. Here is the opening sentence from his panic-stricken, so-called expert-academic scientific perch in his book, The Population Bomb, in the late 1960s.  "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate .

The person Erhlich bet with was another scientist of equal reputation and academic standing.They simply disagreed. And we now know who was incorrect.

One reason is that such a suit by the Department of Justice under the Clinton and Bush 
administrations was successful against the fraudulent industry enterprise to sow false doubt 
about tobacco’s dangers (before the RICO suit was won by DOJ, the Journal had called it
 “abuse,” “hypocrisy,” and “a shakedown”). So there’s the little matter of this being the law.

A second reason is that if there is indeed a core of deliberate fraud at the heart of the climate
 denial enterprise, no industry should be big enough to suppress investigation of that fraud. 
Most of the writers I mentioned note similarities between the tobacco fraud scheme and the
 climate denial operation, as has the lawyer who won the tobacco lawsuit for DOJ; as
 apparently have more than a dozen state Attorneys General.

(Does the same apply, Senator, if fraud is found on the part of scientific zealots
 pushing climate change?)

Climate skeptics — people who “disagree” with me on the reality of climate change — are
 not the targets of such an investigation, any more than smokers or people who “disagreed” 
with the Surgeon General were targets of the tobacco case. Those folks may very well be
 victims of the fraud, the dupes. Fraud investigations punish those who lie, knowing that
they are lying, intending to fool others, and do it for money. No one should be too big to
 answer for that conduct.

(Those who knowingly lie, intending to fool other and do it for money. Does this,
 Mr. Senator, include bureaucrats and politicians?)

This is an important difference, and it’s the difference I’m talking about when I say 
the Wall Street Journal editorial page is trying to saddle me with an argument I’m not 
making because they don’t have a good response to the one I am. Frankly, all this makes
 it look like they are out to protect the fraudsters, by misleading regular people about 
what such a lawsuit would do and continuing their long tradition of downplaying or denying 
scientists’ warnings about the harms of industries’ products.

(And here you have one of the favorite ploys of zealots, guilt by insinuation. 
It's right up there with concrete terms like similarities.) 

Like all zealots, Mr. Whitehouse is extremely selective in selecting his quotes 
(Or at least his taxpayer staff  is!) and that's a two-way street and all the more 
reason not to panic and stifle public debate without the threat of RICO 
arbitrarily hanging over the heads of reputable scientists and decent citizens 
in the public at large. 

Governments' track record around the globe of jumping to serious 
conclusions with serious unintended consequences and wasting serious 
taxpayer money is hardly a shinning example for building public trust. 

Zealots come in all sizes and shapes. One common characteristic is their attire. 
Usually, it's either religious or political. In this case, unfortunately, it's
 both.