Beware of blood lust on the Left

Scratch a global warming fanatic these days and you may find a wannabe executioner.

The way I figure it, wish death upon your political opponents once and it can be ignored as just a warped jest. Do it twice and it looks like evidence of mounting frustration with your neighbors’ inability to see your cause’s crystalline righteousness.

Do it three times and folks around you should start reaching for their hog legs (Don’t know the meaning of that firearms industry technical term? Google it, then read the entry in the Urban Dictionary).

It seems there are more than a few global warming fanatics these days whose patience is wearing thin with those of us who refuse to endorse repeal of what the true believers view as three of the 20th century’s greatest evils – privately owned cars that empower people to go where they please, suburbs that let them  permanently escape city life, and free market capitalism that produces a wider prosperity than seen anywhere else in human history.

So we increasingly hear such folks muttering darkly about things that remind of Robespierre’s cure for counter-revolutionary thinking. Take the most recent example, a post on Talking Points Memo by “The Insolent Braggart” who poses an interesting question: “So when the right wing f--ktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

It would be easy to dismiss this as an isolated example, something akin to the slightly warped jest mentioned above, except for one thing: The sentiment expressed in this anonymous post on one of the Left’s most widely read blogs isn’t exactly unique.

As Marc Morano of Climate Depot (yes, he’s a confirmed denier) points out, global warming fanatics have for several years now been calling for jail or execution for people who disagree with them: “NASA’s James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for ‘high crimes against humanity.’ Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics of 2007, declaring ‘This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.’ In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies ‘criminal enterprises’ and declared CEO’s ‘should be in jail... for all of eternity.’

“In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-Style trials for skeptics. In 2008, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be thrown ‘into jail.’”

What worries me is that this blood lust for vengeance among global warming extremists is mirrored elsewhere on the Left on other issues. The ardor of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers for show trials of former Bush administration officials for their roles in the Iraq War may have cooled for now, but don’t think for a minute they’ve given up on the idea.

Never mind that such trials would unleash a deadly cycle of revenge and counter-revenge not seen since Oliver Cromwell rolled Charles I’s head down the steps of Parliament. Lose a political bout in those days, and you probably lost your head, too.

Then there is the Obama administration’s stealth drive to silence Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the rest of the conservative Talk Radio firmament. They’re not calling it the Fairness Doctrine any more. Now it’s “diversity panels,” which supposedly are citizens groups that will “advise” radio stations on whether or not they are airing sufficiently diverse programming.

This ACORN-izing of broadcast audience feedback will put the mob inside the offices of programming directors everywhere. When mobs with political agendas don’t get what they want, they start busting up people and property.

Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.