Here’s a handy-dandy guide to help track the excuses James Cameron’s used to cluck-cluck-cluck his way out of two (that we know of) global cooling global warming climate change debates – debates the director himself requested (through his proxy Richard Green) with name conservatives, including talk radio host Rusty Humphries, documentary filmmaker Ann McElhinney, Marc Morano, and our own Andrew Breitbart:
1. Sorry Rusty, but I have to jet off to an “eco-emergency” in Brazil.
2. Sorry Andrew and company, but after 10 days of negotiating, Mr. Cameron would prefer to debate Glenn Beck.
Does anyone honestly believe Cameron has the stones to debate Man-Made Climate Change with Glenn Beck? I’m not sure how you debate something that doesn’t exist, but there’s still no way in hell Cameron would debate it with Beck. Yes, that excuse is just Chicken Little doubling down on the phony swagger.
After reading through the 10 days of tortured negotiations between Cameron’s camp and ours – where we agreed to one ludicrous demand of theirs after another — and then learning that Rusty Humphries was run through this same disingenuous eco-mill, the game Cameron’s playing becomes pretty obvious. If I learned nothing in my 17 years of corporate bill collecting, I learned that when someone adamantly refuses to take “yes” for answer, the only conclusion you can come to is that they entered the negotiation in bad faith and with no intention of ever closing a deal.
Cameron wasn’t looking for an open, honest environmental debate. On the contrary, the thought of such a thing apparently scares him to death. And Cameron wasn’t looking for… how did he put it in March? Oh, yeah: “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.”
No, this is the King of the World Chicken of the Sea is playing:
1. Issue a debate challenge to a name conservative.
2. Intentionally make the negotiations long, frustrating and tortured. This includes…
a. Make them pay their own airfare and hotel.
b. Constantly move the negotiation goal posts.
3. Do this until the name conservative gets frustrated and drops out.
4. After the conservative drops out, make a big media spectacle out of how this coward refused the debate challenge.
Nice plan. Only problem is that Humphries and Breitbart refused to back out, which left Cameron humiliated and looking like the coward he is. So what’s a punk to do other than to whip out the lame excuses listed above?
While I can’t speak for Humphries, I did speak to the boss about my theory and he agreed:
“James Cameron came to us through Richard Greene and as the days of negotiations wore on and their demands became more and more ludicrous, that they were hoping we would back out became so painfully obvious that I started to feel bad for Cameron — that he had to invent such an elaborate deception to back up his phony intellectual bravado. But we just kept saying, ‘yes, yes, yes’ to everything they asked of us – even agreeing to fly coach to Aspen after being told without the vaguest sense of enviro-irony that Cameron was ‘flying in to Aspen from Siberia.’
The incontrovertible evidence of Cameron’s bad faith – the proof that his only goal was to get a conservative on the line in the hopes of being increasingly unreasonable until they backed out so he could hold up their scalp in victory, is in this email from Greene to everyone on our team dated August 20th:
What do you two think of an intelligent “Roundtable” where all 6 sit around with a glass of wine or coffee and have a serious conversation in order to try to find some common , ground. Instead of spinning around and around in an adversarial way with both parties claiming “victory”, what about honoring all the participants as “Thought Leaders”, fully listening to their perspectives and showing the American people that both Andrew Breitbart and James Cameron, in their own way and from an authentic perspective, really care about their country. It would even allow Marc Merano [sic] to be more understood and to be considered as such.
How nice. A bottle of wine, a good conversation, a little common ground, and the honoring of all as “Thought Leaders” who “really care about their country.”
Doesn’t that sound pleasant?
Well, the very next day Greene unceremoniously pulled the rug out from under that pretty picture, stating Cameron would only debate Glenn Beck or Senator James Inhofe.
One day after that, before an adoring crowd of Aspen sycophants, here’s how both Greene and Cameron referred to climate change skeptics, the same skeptics they once wanted to find common ground with over a bottle of wine:
Cameron: “I think they’re swine.”
Greene: “Effing demagogues.”
Here’s Breitbart’s response:
“I challenge James Cameron to lead the charge with Big Hollywood to stop eco-unfriendly Hollywood film and television production. We’ll call our initiative: “Lights Off, Camera Off, Action Now!” We can start with an immediate moratorium on wasteful and redundant sequels. Then we’ll create a government bureaucracy to decide what can and cannot be made, with a heavy entertainment surtax for the producers to incur. Our delicate and depleting ecosystem cannot handle more energy-sucking television and film production, especially the size and scope of the average James Cameron production. And anyone that disagrees with me is swine and an effin’ demagogue.”
Let’s see if Chicken of the Sea jets off to the “eco-emergency” currently raging in Hollywood.
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