June 10, 2006
Global Warming and Other Fearmongering? Nah!
Greenpeace's fill-in-the-blank public relations meltdown
Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing."This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the "threat" posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.
But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.
We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."
Had Greenpeace been hacked by a nuke-loving Bush fan? Or was this proof of Greenpeace fear-mongering?
The aghast Greenpeace spokesman who issued the memo, Steve Smith, said a colleague was making a joke by inserting the language in a draft that was then mistakenly released.
"Given the seriousness of the issue at hand, I don't even think it's funny," Smith said.
The final version did not mention Armageddon. It just warned of plane crashes and reactor meltdowns."
Don't let anyone tell you that the GW and other sundry environmentalists are ABOVE the use of Fear Mongering... nah, it's just "ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID[S]." Yeah, that's their story and they're sticking to it, no matter what.
It's too perfect. I was expecting Greenpeace to try and claim it was a hoax - which would be believable. Instead, they're claiming they were misunderstood.
Posted by Assistant Village Idiot at June 10, 2006 03:46 PM
They always have lame excuses.
It was the ambien. It was a joke. It was taken out of context.
Thats not what I meant. I was reading a teleprompter and I got confused. It was 1 or more of the 10 anti-psychotic medications I take for my bi-polar, schizoprenia, paranoia, BDS, IED, delusions,. You're a racist, xenophobe, bigot, islamophobe, meanie!
I'm sure I missed quite a few.
Posted by Ben USN (Ret) at June 11, 2006 05:40 AM
Wait a minute; didn't Al Gore invent Global Warming?
Oh, no . . . that was the internet. Sorry.
Posted by Mustang at June 11, 2006 10:13 AM
What the MSM fails to report (and the left to acknowledge) is that environmental advocacy is today big business. The organizations may be non-profit, but the employees certianly make money from it and also get to go on neat trips to expensive resorts, paid for with money raised by fear mongering campaigns.
Without constant campaigns based on pseudo-science and aimed at scaring money from their naive supporters, these folks would have to work for a living.
What's ironic is that the MSM and the left constantly decry any big business subsity of research or big business advocacy, but totally ignore the reality that the big leftist/environmental ("watermellon") organizations like Greenspeace, Sierra Club and a zillion others are themselves "corporate special interests" whose decision makers have a deep personal financial stake in the results of their scare mongering.
Posted by John Moore at June 12, 2006 11:50 PM
