[DAILYINTERLAKE] Conservative readers question me on a regular basis about why the Daily Inter Lake publishes the somewhat confrontational column by liberal Gene Lyons every week. I've never heard of Lyons, but I suppose somebody must if they read him. Or does anybody read him?
The straightforward answer is because liberals exist and therefore they need a column to read. Far be it from me to shut down the free exchange of ideas.
Try getting that idea on MSNBC...
The more amusing explanation is that rooting for Lyons to get something right is a bit of a guilty pleasure. He's like a 100-to-1 underdog at the Kentucky Derby. He's lost race after race, but the ever-present possibility that Lyons might actually prevail in his effort to put one foot in front of the other to reach a logical conclusion is so giddily intoxicating that reading his column can actually become addictive.
Ahah.I misunderstood. He's a chew toy.
What brings me out of the closet as a Lyons reader, however, is last Thursday's column in which he bravely but foolishly defended the bedraggled climate scientist Michael Mann from the ripostes of Mark Steyn, perhaps the most capably armed social critic since Edmund Wilson.
According to Lyons, Steyn is due for a comeuppance because of his nasty personal attacks on Mr. Mann's character. Indeed, Mann has sued Steyn, National Review, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for their audacity in challenging the Penn State climate scientist's theories (most famously the global-warming hockey stick), his credentials, and most importantly his character.
Lyons thinks it is inappropriate for a social critic to actually criticize, and has come down against the First Amendment and in favor of Steyn being pilloried in the common square (NOTE: this is an exaggeration for rhetorical effect, and I would appreciate not being sued over it).
Steyn's apparent offense is that he dared to challenge the scientific orthodoxy on climate change,
"E pur se non muove."
and he did it most colorfully. This is somewhat ironic since Lyons is himself noted for his acerbic barbs, aimed mostly at poor country bumpkins and rich Republicans.
Noted for potshotting at the unarmed, is he?
Lyons wrote his column partly to commiserate with poor Michael Mann for being so abused while on a high pedestal of social acclaim, but more importantly to warn climate critics to keep their opinions to themselves.
What Lyons selectively omits from his column is the well-known fact that Steyn, unlike the other defendants, has dropped any effort to dismiss the libel charges against him because he relishes the idea of going to trial and getting a court to actually adjudicate the validity of the "hockey stick" and Mr. Mann's claims to being a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.
I strongly encourage anyone interested in either brilliant writing, a good laugh, or a wistful farewell to Western civilization to visit Mr. Steyn's website at www.steynonline.com and read at random from any of his essays. You will not be disappointed.
In particular, Mr. Steyn is an unabashed advocate of free speech. Not surprisingly he has therefore been the frequent target of those people (usually liberals with limited understanding of the roots of liberalism) who aim to shut down free speech.
He means people with dictatorial tendencies.
In Canada, Steyn was the victim of that country's "hate speech" law, which attempts to prevent him or anyone else from accurately describing the beliefs of the Moslem religion because it might "incite hatred" against Moslems. Steyn prevailed in that prolonged persecution, but now he is the target of Michael Mann's petulant lawsuit.
Mann took offense at the fact that Steyn quoted another author, Rand Simberg, who wittily compared Penn State scientist Mann to Penn State serial molester Jerry Sandusky by saying that Mann had "molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet."
Never mind that Steyn said he thought Simberg was overzealous in his extended metaphor; Mann was unhinged by the audacity of Steyn claiming that the famous climate-change hockey stick was fraudulent.
... millions of dollars of grant money later...
The good news is that it is either fraudulent or it isn't, and a presumably impartial court is now going to have to decide the matter. Steyn will be able to present evidence about how the inventors of the hockey stick manipulated data in order to create what Steyn calls "the single most influential image in the campaign to sell Big Climate alarmism at the turn of the century."