IF AL GORE DIDN'T EXIST, ALINSKYITE CLIMATE DENIERS WOULD HAVE HAD TO INVENT HIM

Al Gore has issued a statement linking the severity of Hurricane Sandy to climate change. Here in New York, what he's saying is not considered controversial or out of the mainstream. Here's our governor:

Cuomo said he spoke twice yesterday to Obama, joking at one point "we have a 100-year flood every two years now."

"There's no such thing as a 100-year flood," Cuomo said. "These are extreme weather patterns. The frequency has been increasing."

And here's what the dialogue between scientists and government officials has been like here:

The warnings came, again and again.

For nearly a decade, scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns....

After rising roughly an inch per decade in the last century, coastal waters in New York are expected to climb as fast as six inches per decade, or two feet by midcentury, according to a city-appointed scientific panel. That much more water means the city’s flood risk zones could expand in size.

A state report on rising sea levels, issued on the last day of Gov. David A. Paterson's administration in 2010, suggested that erecting structural barriers to restrain floodwaters could be part of a broader approach, along with relocating buildings and people farther from the coasts.

But right-wingers love Saul Alinsky -- they pay far more attention to him than left-wingers do -- and Alinsky's 12th Rule for Radicals is as follows:

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Climate deniers attack as many targets as possible, but attacking Gore has worked very well for them. It helped, of course, that he was already a figure of mockery after what the mainstream press did to him in 2000. So, of course, he's the focus right now at winger sites such as Michelle Malkin's place, along with other Alinsky-ready objects of winger hate:

... And if you're the type that demands confirmation from a more credible scientific source before you'll believe a claim from Gore, Meghan McCain is backing Al up on this all the way. As a matter of fact, Van Jones thinks the right owes Gore an apology.

Let me remind you that David Brooks thinks the Alinskyite targeting of Al Gore on this issue was a perfectly appropriate way for the discussion of the issue to develop (and was Gore's fault):

Al Gore released his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.

So if the winger Alinskyites pick you as a target, well, you asked for it, just for being targetable. And the degradation of the debate is your responsibility.