Beth Reinhard The Miami Herald

November 8, 2009

Beth Reinhard
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE:Sisyphus, Nit-wit Gore, Reason upended, and “settled science”. Some comments on your Q&A session in the Herald with our most famous ex-Vice President turned grifter.

Ms. Reinhard,

Your picture suggests that you are too young to have shared in the glory years of the Carter administration.

Then, the biggest climatological problem we faced was – and I am telling you the truth – was Global Cooling. The claptrap promulgated by the scientific faker Rachel Carson were gaining main stream credence. On top of that we had a con artist with a Ph.D., an intellectual Bernie Madoff, named Paul Ehrlich who told us in 1970 that we would all starve to death by 2000. He was a regular Jeremiah on late night TV shows. As if that weren’t bad enough the “Clod Populist from Plains” said the country’s “malaise” was caused by – and I know you will find this almost impossible to believe – us.

It seemed that the only solution – the final solution? – to Global Cooling was – and who says that trope irony is dead – Global Warming.

Quicker than Pravda would air brush a deposed junior member of the Politburo out of the official May Day Parade photo, quicker than the modern American Liberals overcame their tacit approval of Hitler in the 22 months of the Hitler/Stalin Pact, the boogeyman became Global Warming. Since the most ardent wanabee Lysenkos in favor of banning air conditioning, plastic syringes, and inorganic chemistry to save drowning polar bears and to make the world safe for tofu cannot make the facts fit their convoluted, head up their collective asses theory have jettisoned Global Warming in favor of Climate Change.

[Here’s a non-Bruce Springsteen, non-U2 aside. Climate Change has already been chronicled. Google Vivaldi. Go to Borders. Buy a CD. Since Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Great Britain, a man who lives in the house that Thatcher, Churchill, and Disraeli lived in, gave us 50 days to live in October, I suggest you wear out the CD as you await, hopefully stoically, the End of Days. Let Epictetus be your band leader.]

Your interview with Oscar winning, Nobel Prize winning, former Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. – AKA “Cementhead” to his Secret Service detail but Alpha Gump to me – prompts me to ask at least one question.

“Silent Spring” spawned the first political response to an environmental problem. It was the rejection of the Storm King Water tunnel. DDT and Phisohex were banned. The Club of Rome in its Project 2000 report told the world not to buy any green bananas. I must confess that around the same time I began to squirt Right Guard out my bathroom window after I showered. Since I believed the political non-scientists I wanted to hasten the disappearance of the Ozone Layer. I thought that anything that hurried our demise would be good. Why linger on in agony and starvation when we could end it quickly? I was a one man Global Death Panel before Sarah Palin made the term popular. Also, I stopped shaving in 1979. It was the least I could do to husband our dwindling resources. Further, since half the electricity generated in this country comes from burning coal, I thought if I limited my use of hot water I could gain some much needed environmental indulgences. If I add in the amount of steel I saved by not using blades I am half way to the pantheon shared by Jacques Cousteau, as phony a PR straw man who ever bestrode the gullible world of American balderdash.

My question is this:

The quasi-glacier atop Mount Kilimanjaro is melting. If I were to mention that it has been receding since 1887, the first year it was measured, it might take away from the “correlation is causation” crisis so I won’t.

Polar bears are drowning because the polar ice cap is melting.

Everybody and everything has to be someplace. I think it was Aristotle who said that “something cannot be that which it is not”.

Where is the water going?

Surely if the water in any of Florida’s shore lines had been rising the pernicious insurance companies would have noticed and set their rates accordingly.

Even Prizewinner Gump’s 27 bedroom, 12 and ½ bathroom house, the one with the ski slope, the one with the salmon swimming in the largest man made river in the world, the one that feeds the rescued polar bears, the one with eagles scavenging the salmon that the bears don’t finish, could not hold all the water from all the ice that is melting.

Ask him where it is going. Get back to me. Before it’s too late.



Kevin Smith