Bush Visit with Crichton Puts Leftists in State of Fear

RUSH: All right, this is fabulous. This is from the New York Times yesterday: “One of the perquisites of being president is the ability to have the author of a book you enjoyed pop into the White House for a chat. Over the years, a number of writers have visited President Bush, including Natan Sharansky, Bernard Lewis and John Lewis Gaddis. And while the meetings are usually private, they rarely ruffle feathers. Now, one has. In his new book about Mr. Bush, ‘Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush,’ Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, ‘State of Fear,’ suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat. Mr. Barnes, who describes Mr. Bush as ‘a dissenter on the theory of global warming,’ writes that the president ‘avidly read’ the novel and met the author after Karl Rove… arranged it.”
Gasp!
“He says Mr. Bush and his guest ‘talked for an hour
and were in near-total agreement.'”
Gasp!
“‘The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more.'”
Gasp!
“And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton’s dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change.”
So does the sun. Ahem!
“Mr. Crichton, whose views in ‘State of Fear‘ helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best. ‘This shows the president is more interested in science fiction than science,’ Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch…” Why is it that somebody who is as accredited and accomplished as Michael Crichton is automatically dissed, and some wacko, Looney Toon lib who runs a fund-raising group under the guise of having it be concern about the environment is automatically assigned god-like status? It’s because militant environmentalism is one of the tentacles of liberalism seeking to envelop our planet in its evil grip. “‘This administration has put no limit on global warming pollution and has consistently rebuffed any suggestion to do so.’ Not so, according to the White House, which said Mr. Barnes’s book left a false impression of Mr. Bush’s views on global warming.”

I’ll tell you what I want you to do. In fact, I was trying to get Koko to link to this, because I (Rush’s Coverage) once found a fabulous speech that Michael Crichton gave on global warming on his website, MichaelCrichton.com, and I periodically go there to see if there are updates. I went there last week, and he made the most amazing presentation on the complexity of things on this planet with the futile attempts of we mere mortals to try to explain this complexity. He goes through the entire scenario of how our well-intentioned efforts to manage wildlife and the ecosystem at Yellowstone practically destroyed it in the twenties and thirties all the way up through the seventies because we thought we knew better than nature. We thought we had to get rid of the elk, then we had to get rid of the bear, then we gotta get rid of the coyote.
Well, that got rid of the beavers because the beavers got all screwed up. It’s got charts. It’s got graphs. But the thing that I liked about it is that the whole concept of his speech or this lecture is “complexity,” and how we think of ecosystems here as manageable by us because we have no concept of the complexity and the interaction all of the complexity that is creation engages in. It’s our vanity. It’s our stupidity. It’s our lack of respect for how all that is came to be, including ourselves, and in his own way what… You know, Crichton doesn’t delve into the religious, but I have mentioned this a number of times: I just don’t see how it’s possible for a human being to walk anywhere on this planet and not just literally be in awe of it.
It cannot just have “happened.” It is not a series of coincidences. It’s too brilliant — brilliant beyond our meager abilities to even hope to comprehend a part of it. That’s his whole theory. The complexity of just one molecule — the complexity of one molecule interacting in the human body or any other organism — we don’t understand it. We couldn’t design it; we couldn’t build it, and yet here we are believing that our little inventions and creations are destroying all of this. It’s patently absurd! If you haven’t read State of Fear you ought to get it and you ought to read it, because he puts it in novel form, but documents how many of these groups actually try to create accidents and disasters on the eve of big conventions where they’re going to be trying to raise money, how it is all a fund-raising operation; it all has its own political agenda.
When he started to write State of Fear his objective was to confirm that we had major, major, major environmental problems we were causing. He found out just the opposite. He found out so much of the data is rigged, so much is made up, so much ignored, so much of it is actually misrepresented as the opposite of what it is. So I think the most we could do is link to his website and this particular speech on complexity, and it’s not hard to understand, and there are plenty of examples. He even takes an excerpt from a UK newspaper from last October after Hurricane Katrina, and this was one of these scare headlines: We are destroying our world! How much time do we have left? — and Crichton said, “It was a hurricane. It was simply a hurricane.”
And he points out how fear is an elemental part, fundamental part of the whole environmental wacko movement, and that the journalism community relies on fear, that most everybody relies on fear to captivate people’s attention, and the line has to be continually moving toward the extreme and the more extreme, because we become accustomed to certain fear so it takes more to scare us. But it really was a brilliant little presentation on complexity, and coupled with other speeches that he’s given and lectures that you can read. (He’s got the transcripts to all of them on his website.) I think it would be well worth your time to do it. The fact that he’s up there talking to Bush, that Bush wanted to talk to him about this book, fine and dandy with me. Tom Clancy has been up there, too. Reagan had Tom Clancy in after he wrote The Hunt for Red October and, you know, the libs are all worried about that. “Oh my God! Clancy is going to have Reagan nuking Moscow before they have dinner!” The left is just a bunch… Talk about fear! That’s their perpetual state, in their own right.
END TRANSCRIPT

Read the Michael Crichton Speeches on…
(Fear, Complexity & Environmental Management in the 21st Century -Nov. 6, 2005)
(Environmentalism as Religion -September 15, 2003)
Read the Latest Bit of Fear-Mongering on the Left…
<a target=new href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/national/19warming.html”>(NY Times: Bush’s Chat With Novelist Alarms Environmentalists)</a>
<*ICON*>Read Rush’s Original Coverage…
<a target=new href=”//home/eibessential/estack/crichton.member.html”>(Crichton: Environmentalism As Religion – 09.22.05)</a>
<a target=new href=”//home/estack/you_cannot_destroy_the_earth.member.html”>(Crichton, Heston: You Can’t Destroy Earth – 12.04.04)</a>
<a target=new href=”//home/eibessential/extraordinary_people/take_it_from_natan_sharansky.member.html”>(Take It from Natan Sharansky – 01.20.05)</a>
Buy the Books…
<a target=new href=”http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click?bfmid=2181&sourceid=38461944&bfpid=0066214130&bfmtype=book”>(State of Fear – Michael Crichton)</a>
<a target=new href=”http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click?bfmid=2181&sourceid=38461944&bfpid=0425133516&bfmtype=book”>(The Hunt for Red October – Tom Clancy)</a>

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