A Lot of Hot Air

I have had a lot of thoughts regarding two particular topics: Iraq and Global Warming. There's a connection, I swear.

Of late, Katie Couric - aka, "The Perky Katie Couric" - and much of the mainstream media has been quick to begin declaring that the situation in Iraq has become, "A Civil War." I guess words like "quagmire" were used up with Vietnam and no longer grab the attention in the headlines. There is one positive side to this classification: the media finally recognizes that this is a War, something that has been heretofore unacknowledged.

These media wags must be reading the most broad of definitions to conclude that this is, indeed, a war that is civil. A "civil war," loosely defined, is a war between factions of the same country. In truth, I guess Iraq has been in a civil war since the early 1980's considering that during the entire reign of Saddam factions opposed one another, though the Fedayeen always seemed to muster the upper hand. Yes, in this broad definition, there is a civil war.

But, who is the enemy here? The factions opposing one another are really Iraq/Coalition Forces v. Al Qaida/Iran/Syria/Hezbollah. That seems more like a mini-world war to me than it is a civil war. But, again, there's hope: we now know that this is a war.

New Topic: The 2006 hurricane season has just ended. If you recall, pundits were fainting and foaming at the mouth, apoplectic at the potential for apocalyptic type hurricanes that were about to rain down upon the United States. Weather prognosticators predicted 13 to 18 named storms, 6 of which would be massive.

Well, despite all the breathless hand wringing, the hurricane season truly disappointed: only 9 named storms, 5 hurricanes, 2 major, and 0 that walloped U.S. soil. And Steve Cantori's heart broke.

So did Al Gore's.

It is becoming more and more apparent that global warming is a bunch of bunk. Snow in Florida earlier this month, 0 hurricanes threatening our way of life, a rather mild summer - it looks like it is an inconvenient truth: global warming is the stuff of bigfoot legends, not immutable science.

Civil wars and hurricanes usually do not relate to one another, but in this sense they do. In each, the media was more than willing to glom onto the stories. With genuinely disturbed excitement, the media has hammered away these points. Their reporting has been such that the media itself has become the story.

It appears that the only hot air of any real consequence is usually captured on tape, or published on the front page of the NY Times.

Too bad the Kyoto protocols do not include regulations of punditry.