Outrageous Outrage of the Day, Starring Danny Glover
In today’s outrageous outrage, tu quoque specialists everywhere are faking outrageous outrage over remarks made by leftist actor Danny Glover in a phone interview. The screaming was so high-pitched I was motivated to check out the video recording:
This is the section being pulled out of context:
The threat of what happened to Haiti is the threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean, to these island nations. You know, they’re all in peril because of global warming, they’re all in peril because of climate change and all this. And we need to find … when we did what we did at the climate summit, in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’? That we have to act now.
Danny Glover’s a pretty hardcore Hollywood leftist; hangs out with Hugo Chavez, visits Cuba, talks a lot about American misdeeds in Central America. (And there have been a few.) He’s trying to politicize the Haitian disaster, clumsily, by saying that all the Caribbean island nations are in danger from global warming (in addition to earthquakes), and that “a new kind of internationalism” is needed to address it. He rambles for a while about this, then finishes by saying that the international meeting in Copenhagen led to the “response” — the international relief effort.
This is all very muddled and stream of consciousness, but you’d have to really stretch to say he meant the earthquake was the response to Copenhagen. He never says anything remotely resembling what’s already going around numerous right wing blogs — that global warming caused the Haitian earthquake.
Tim Blair is one who comes right out and makes this claim:
Actor Danny Glover believes that the Haitian earthquake was caused by climate change and global warming…
Blair proceeds to the inevitable comparison with Pat Robertson’s remarks, which isn’t totally off base — Glover and Robertson are both trying to politicize the disaster — but the comparison breaks down because Glover is at least making a point (murky though it is) based on facts: it’s true that island nations will the first to feel the effects of rising sea levels.
But Glover never says the earthquake was caused by global warming. Tim Blair is twisting Glover’s words to make him seem as much of a crazy “zealot” as someone like, say, Pat Robertson. It’s all about the tu quoque!
Robertson, on the other hand, said the Haitian earthquake was divine retribution incurred by Haitians who signed a pact with Satan. You know, Beelzebub? That’s another level of crazy entirely.
