Sen. Boxer and ClimateGate: The Terror of Tiny Town

As the USS Obama Administration slowly starts to settle into the waves, future historians will be kept busy searching for the source of the iceberg that holed it below the waterline on its maiden voyage to the land of Hope and Change. Was it the non-stimulating “stimulus”? The ludicrous Nobel Peace Prize? The decision to try the Sept. 11^th plotters in lower Manhattan? The Afghanistan speech at West Point this week, splitting the difference between surging and surrendering as the photo-op cadets nodded off in the background? It’s a tough call, and the first year’s not even over yet.

But this administration is more than simply its swivel-headed Fearless Leader, ping-ponging between his teleprompters as the law of diminishing returns exerts its iron grip on his poll numbers. It’s also the executive officers, the governing party’s top senators and congressmen, the palace courtiers who enforce discipline among the spear-carriers as they split up the swag. In this, the Obama Administration is especially blessed, featuring both the frozen rictus of Anunciata d’Alesandro Pelosi as the speaker of the house and Harry “the Horse” Reid, an innocent Mormon virgin wandering among the fleshpots and real-estate deals of Las Vegas, as the Senate majority leader. The Right is, indeed, fortunate in its enemies.

Still, the prize for the dumbest Democrat currently extorting a salary from the taxpayer (check out what her staff costs you here) remains where it long has been, in the grip of Barbara “Call Me Senator” Boxer, née Levy, the pride of Brooklyn and, latterly, of Marin County, Calif., and former relation-by-marriage to Hillary Rodham Clinton during the brief marriage between her daughter, Nicole, and Hillary’s sterling brother, Tony. Tony Rodham, you may recall, is a former prison guard and repo man who managed to get himself into hot water over a hazelnut deal in the republic of Georgia, got caught up in Pardongate, was assaulted in flagranteby a man who claimed Tony was boinking his girlfriend, got caught up in bankruptcy court and battled his ex over child-support payments.

Standing not quite five feet tall, Boxer has consistently distinguished herself in the discharge of her duties, including trying to prevent the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes during the 2000 election, attacking Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearings, racially patronizing Harry Alford of the Black Chamber of Commerce, and dressing down my namesake, Brig. General Michael Walsh, for an act of what she considered lèse majesté. The general had to bite his tongue, but the righteous contempt with which Alford treats the senator’s plantation racism was one of the feel-good stories of the year.

Not for nothing has she earned the people’s choice award as America’s Stupidest Senator and against some stiff competition. Now, the Terror of Tiny Town has stepped into the steaming pile of Climategate, the recent revelations via leaked/hacked emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. But is “Don’t Call Me Ma’am” Boxer upset that a scheme designed to siphon trillions of dollars away from the western economies, reduce their standard of living to Third World levels and enrich crackpot global-warming enthusiasts like Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.? Of course not. What’s got Barb’s panties in a bunch is “E-mail-theft-gate.” “You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate. Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not… This is a crime.”

Her agita comes as no surprise. Gangsters always get antsy when threatened with exposure of their rackets, and Climate Fraud is a hell of a racket, a grand bargain among greedy science whores, malevolent government officials and a supine but protective media – Americans who get their news from The New York Times or the networks basically have no idea what we’re talking about here – who are all in this together. As Mark Steyn noted Wednesday over at NRO:

Whatever your views on the merits, if you’re an “environmental journalist” this ought to be news. The reviled “skeptics” and “deniers” have forced Prof. Phil Jones in East Anglia to step down “temporarily” and prompted Penn State to investigate Prof. Michael Mann. Yet you’d have no idea of what the story was about from reading the AP reports in the average American monodaily… As Jonah [Goldberg] has said, this is not just a science scandal but a journalism scandal — worldwide.

With the Copenhagen Climate Conference coming up, the ruinous Waxman-Markey bill rattling around Capitol Hill, and the investigation into climate data-manipulation starting to head to these shores, the Democrats are heavily invested in “hiding the decline,” so naturally they’re changing the subject. Leaving aside for the moment the sheer counterintuitive insanity (did I mention Al Gore?) of carbon-constraining a civilization of carbon-based life forms, it’s awfully convenient for the Left to discover its High Dudgeon about leaks right about now. For leaking, in all probability, is what we’re dealing with here: an insider who, faced with the specter of Copenhagen, decided to go public, rather than some crazed right-wing “denier” brazenly hacking into the system. Indeed, the BBC had the files a month before they were posted on a handy Russian server – but naturally suppressed them.

Leaks are as old as the republic, and one man’s leaker is another man’s heroic whistle-blower. And, in the end, it all comes down to one’s interpretation of the First Amendment. The leak of the Pentagon Papers by a disaffected Daniel Ellsberg not only set the gold standard, but the subsequent Supreme Court decision, a 6-3 ruling in favor of The New York Times, which had published the purloined material, also firmly established the First Amendment principle of no prior restraint on publication.

Closer to our time, there was the 1996 cell phone call between embattled Speaker Newt Gingrich and some of his supporters strategizing about how to handle various ethics charges brought against him by the Democrats, which was intercepted and taped by a pair of Democratic activists, John and Alice Martin, who just so happened to be driving around in their car that day, monitoring the police scanner. They leaked the tape to radical left-wing congressman “Baghdad” Jim McDermott, who helpfully passed it over to reporters. Sued by John Boehner (R-Ohio), one of the phone call’s participants, for invasion of privacy, McDermott stonewalled for five years before finally admitting he was the source of the press leak. The case went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it because it had already decided, in a similar case, that the principle of no prior restraint also applied to the airwaves, no matter how the tape was obtained. “A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens.

So nothing is likely to come from Barbara “I’m Not a Madam, I’m a Senator” Boxer’s idle threat to get to the bottom of “E-mail-theft-gate.” Like the rest of the Democrats, she has too much invested in the scam, and with electoral disaster looming for Obama and the Democrats next year, she’s and the rest of the executive officers are going full speed ahead with their radical agenda, and damn the icebergs dead ahead.