Scott Spiegel

So much for the lie that poverty causes terrorism.

Despite the mainstream media’s refusal to accept it, there is one factor more reliable than any other in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies:

(1) It’s not whether he lives in third world poverty and resents being overshadowed by the Imperialist West.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, was the son of a prominent, wealthy Nigerian bank chairman.  Abdulmutallab attended the British School in Togo and University College London, the latter of which cost as much as Obama shells out for his daughters to attend a semester at Sidwell Friends.  Abdulmutallab’s college dorm was a $6 million apartment in London’s West End.

If poverty caused terrorism, then a corollary of this argument is that a country’s efforts to relieve poverty should prevent terrorism.  Yet the U.S. provided Arlington, VA-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan with a free medical education worth tens of thousands of dollars, which apparently did not console him enough to keep him from murdering fellow soldiers on his military post in Ft. Hood, Texas.  Indeed, Hasan planned and carried out the attack after having been promoted from captain to major, despite miserable performance reviews.

John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and San Anselmo, California and attended a “California Distinguished School” in the Tamalpais Union High School District.

If poverty caused terrorism, then poor people the world over—rice farmers in China, untouchables in India, non-flat screen TV owners in the U.S.—would be rising up en masse to wreak havoc in hijackings and suicide bombings.

(2) It’s not post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or any garden-variety psychological malady.  If it were, we would expect suicide bombings from Vietnam vets, or from the New York Times staff after the public option was dropped from the health care bill.

(3) It’s not whether we’re currently at war with the place where the individual resides.  I don’t recall any recent U.S. incursions into Nigeria, Arlington, or San Anselmo.

The most reliable factor in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies is: whether the individual adheres to an ideology that encourages engaging in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies.

Never mind that the ideology in question always happens to be Islamist.  At this point, even I would be fine with overlooking this fact if we would just do something about these threats when they surface.

If the warning signs sent by would-be terrorists were densely coded and difficult to decipher, delayed action by our national security officials might be understandable.  But a PowerPoint presentation urging Muslims to cut off the heads of infidels and pour burning oil down their throats is not subtle.

Nidal Hasan delivered a now-infamous lecture to an auditorium of army psychiatrists in which he imparted charming Koranic admonishments for the nonbeliever such as “Seize him and drag him in the midst of the blazing fire.  Then pour over his head the torment of boiling water” and “We shall burn them in fire.  As often as their skins are roasted through, we shall change them for other skins that they may taste the punishment.”  This is not exactly the Venona cables.

Abdulmutallab’s high school teacher reported that, when he wasn’t busy captaining the water polo team, he repeatedly defended the Taliban’s tactics in classroom discussions and endorsed the 9/11 attacks.  Abdulmutallab disappeared in October, cut off ties with his family, and moved to Yemen to learn Arabic, all of which prompted his father to call the American Embassy in Nigeria to warn that Umar was a likely threat to the U.S.

John Walker Lindh began studying Islam in high school and converted when he was 16, moved to Yemen to study at a madrassa when he was 19, and wrote his family letters, not asking for money, but praising the bombing of the USS Cole by Sudan-funded terrorists.

Yet regarding the motivations of these attackers, the current Democratic administration warns us not to jump to any conclusions, or at least any that might interfere with the bestowal of glory upon Allah.  I can sooner conceive of stubborn liberals going after Nigerian bankers as a suspect class before I can imagine them pointing the finger at Islamists.

If we can throw an American in jail for joking that he’d like to shoot the president, can we please add a militant, well-funded Islamist with terrorist connections to the crummy no-fly list?

Warning: Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, and Balloon Boy are nowhere to be found in this list!

1. Iran Election Upheaval – Brave protestors took to the streets of Tehran and Twittered to the world shocking pictures and videos of civilian beatings and shootings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, despite the inability of our Commander-in-Chief to raise an eyebrow over the carnage for a week.  As “President” Ahmadinejad continues to mock the West’s demands that Iran halt its uranium enrichment, the outrage of the emboldened and mobilized protest movement has the potentially farthest-reaching consequences of any event in 2009.

2. Health Care Reform Debate – Simultaneously the most outrageous and boring story of 2009.  On the one hand, we listened all year in disbelief as conservative think tanks unearthed fresh horrors in evolving versions of the bill; on the other hand, we listened to Democrats recite tired lies about “45 million uninsured” and “bending the cost curve” and “Nancy Pelosi approving a surtax on Botox.”  As Obama supporter Camille Paglia admitted, “By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.”

3. Climategate – In which more pages of e-mails and computer code than in all the healthcare reform bills combined were leaked to the press, revealing climate “scientists” fudging data, threatening to delete data, and doing everything but counting pregnant chads to make the results come out the way they wanted.  Here’s a deal for Michael Mann, author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature over the past few millennia: if “trick,” “hide,” and “decline” no longer mean what they once did, then neither do “dire,” “peer-reviewed,” or “consensus.”

4. Afghanistan Surge – General McChrystal begged President Obama in private and in public to give him the troops he needed to implement the counterinsurgency strategy Obama had hired him to carry out back in March.  After four months of dawdling, Obama gave McChrystal 75% of his revised request—which was 50% of his initial request—with no rationale provided for his bargain basement offer.  If this is how Obama treats the “good war,” I’d hate to see what he does to the bad one.

5. Tea Party Movement – Rasmussen released a poll in December showing that in a three-way generic race among Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party candidates, the Tea Party contender would beat the Republican by 5 points.  Despite the left’s ludicrous charges of racism and desperate use of lewd sexual terms never adopted by any Tea Party patriot, the biggest mass uprising against government spending and abuse of power since 1773 grew angrier and more forceful as the year went on, and will only be further inflamed by the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care spending act.

6. Stimulus Bill Passage – It would give you a concussion if it fell on you, even if dropped by Obama at the nadir of his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emperor of Japan.  Four months after its urgently required, life-or-death passage, only 5% of stimulus funds had been spent, a detail the administration papered over by simply lying about funded projects.  Naturally, this summer Democrats began clamoring for another stimulus package.

7. Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation – Proof that Democrats were never the party against racism—they were once the party that supported racism, and now they’re the party that supports reverse racism.  If Our Wise Latina’s speeches on biological differences between the races had been half as incendiary, the media would be consoling us that she might have been rejected for the Supreme Court if what she had said had been any worse; yet the fact is, if her words had been twice as offensive, wimpy Republicans in Congress would probably still have voted to confirm her.

8. Ft. Hood Shootings – The first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, which was allowed to happen for the same reason as 9/11—the politically correct refusal to identify the danger of Islamism and its adherents’ wish to obliterate us and our allies for promoting freedom.  The most damning detail was Major Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation to a group of army scientists on the Koran’s injunction to decapitate infidels—to which the army responded by giving Hasan a promotion in Texas to get him out of their hair.

9. Pakistan Helps the U.S. Fight the Taliban – The Pakistan Army finally stepped up to the plate, no thanks to Obama’s dithering over the U.S.’s own commitment in the region.  Pakistan began Operation Path to Deliverance, in which they managed to send the same number of troops Obama finally agreed to as part of General McChrystal’s surge (30,000) to South Waziristan to beat back insurgents.

10. New Jersey/Virginia Gubernatorial Elections – Last year, liberals hooted that Republican primary candidates were avoiding George W. Bush like the plague, but the joke’s on them—their messiah is turning into the kiss of death in just his first year of office.  Obama’s multiple campaign stops for would-be governors Corzine and Deeds did nothing to assist them, and possibly even hindered their candidacies.

Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Dede Scozzafava… whoops—that’s the Huffington Post’s Top 10 Conservatives of 2009!

10. Hannah Giles, Conservative Activist and “Performing Artist” – Twenty-year-old Giles helped bust ACORN with her brilliantly direct scheme of walking right into their offices and asking their staff if they’d help her set up a prostitution ring with underage El Salvadoran girls, to which they responded by falling all over themselves to comply.  It’s so horrifying it’s like those classic psychology experiments in which researchers had no idea their subjects would actually carry out their instructions, like Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiment.

9. Sarah Palin, Democratic Congressional Reelection Death Panelist – This summer Palin helped put Democrats’ health care “reform” initiative on indefinite life support by identifying the logical conclusion of their plans to expand health care coverage while slashing Medicare and not increasing the deficit—i.e., health care rationing, or “death panels.”  In addition to resigning in July and saving Alaskans millions by heading off costly and baseless ethics complaints against her, she released an autobiography that’s on track to become the best-selling political memoir ever.

8. Dick Cheney, Former Vice President and Current Presidential Superego – If there’s anything that can compensate for not having Dick Cheney as VP anymore, it’s getting to hear him expound on the pigheaded mistakes the new President is repeatedly making on foreign policy.  Cheney hammered Obama for promising to close Guantanamo Bay, for releasing the “torture” memos, for “dithering” over his decision on General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan, and for bringing self-confessed 9/11 masterminds to Manhattan for civilian trials.

7. Rick Santelli, CNBC Editor and Ranteur Extraordinaire – On a wintry day in February, some prescient burst of fiery indignation took hold of this outspoken CNBC commentator, who railed on-air against the irresponsibility of Obama’s Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan and got the CME Group futures traders on the floor around him up in arms.  His idea led to the grassroots Tea Party Movement, which spawned rallies on April 15, the July 4 weekend, and September 12 in thousands of cities across the country, with hundreds of thousands of attendees.

6. Doug Hoffman, RINO Party Crasher – Though he lost the special election for the open House seat in New York’s 23rd congressional district, he came remarkably close to winning, and he forced out a RINO who had backing from ACORN and was as bad as or worse than the Democratic candidate.  Hoffman reenergized the GOP on a national level, and an Obama visit or two to New York’s 23rd district, like the multiple stops he made for losing gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia, would probably have pushed Hoffman over the top.

5. Liz Cheney, Accomplished Conservative Mother of Five Who Isn’t Palin or Bachmann – Cheney tirelessly fought off the fact-deficient ravings of Andrea Mitchell, Norah O’Donnell and others, demonstrating the temerity desperately needed by the GOP in defending its principles against an MSM stacked against us.  Cheney will indisputably be a figure on the national political scene in coming years, because she’s already said she’s “open” to running for public office—and in politics, “no” means “maybe” and “maybe” means “yes.”

4. John Boehner, House Minority Leader and Stimulus Bill Percussionist – Boehner played an unassuming but important role, out of the spotlight, visible mostly only to his colleagues on the House floor.  He consistently pushed for free market reforms to health care and denounced the Democrats’ plans to increase government involvement and spending in health care.  He also ably deconstructed Obama disasters like the stimulus bill and Cash for Clunkers.

3. Rush Limbaugh, Racist Attention-Seeker Who Hates Obama for Personal Reasons – Rush could have taken the year off and coasted into the top 10 with the cumulative influence he’s had on the conservative movement, but in 2009 he had a particularly effective year, one in which he dissected the Obama administration’s schemes and always kept his listeners one step ahead of the MSM.  Rush stated early on, “I hope Obama fails.”  Everyone, including Rush’s opponents, knew exactly what he meant—and Rush never backed down from his statement.

2. Michele Bachmann, America’s Favorite Tea Party Hostess – This was the year that Bachmann, like Liz Cheney, became a conservative rock star.  She rallied the troops at Tea Party gatherings, including the massive march in D.C. in September, proposed her own health care reform bill, and cosponsored others.  Gail Collins labeled her “Washington’s newest Famous Strange Person,” proving once again that liberals have no measure of the force of the reinvigorated conservative movement that is about to hit them.

1. Mark Levin, Best-selling Author Never Interviewed by ABC, CBS, or NBC or reviewed by the Times or the Post – Sarah Palin was photographed carrying it at rallies, Michele Bachmann called it “the book of all time,” and Rush Limbaugh predicted conservative college students would clandestinely pass it around in plain brown wrappers.  Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year, spending three months at #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list; Levin also had the best year yet of his radio show, still the fastest-growing in the country.

Honorable Mention: Joe Wilson, Destroyer of Obamacare Illusions – Wilson refused to let Obama get away with lying about illegal immigrants’ not being covered under his health care reform bill; the Democratic denouncement of his “You lie!” outburst resulted in a heated, protracted debate over an issue that was supposedly already settled.

Ineligible, but Fought the Good Fight: Joe Lieberman, Obamacare Obstructionist – He’s not reliable—he marched three miles to the Capitol on the Sabbath to vote for a $2 trillion spending bill, after all—but this Independent Democrat stalled health care “reform” almost long enough to push the Senate’s deliberations into the no-man’s land of a midterm election year.

Special Award: Jake Tapper, Reporter So Ruthless in Investigating Obama You Couldn’t Tell What Party He Belonged To – From uncovering Tom Daschle’s unpaid taxes to investigating the President’s phony stimulus spending claims, Tapper deservedly ended the year at the top of Mediaite’s list of most influential journalists in the country.

I hate to have to point out the obvious to the rosy-cheeked, starry-eyed eco-warriors heading en masse to the international global warming summit this week (OK—I love to point it out), but the fact is that the Copenhagen Climate Conference is going to be, on every level, a monumental failure.

As has been reported for months, the nations of the world have not agreed, and will not agree, to legally binding reductions or limits on carbon dioxide emissions at the conference.  The biggest “polluters” are least likely to volunteer to give up their 21st-century living standards (the U.S., Australia, Canada) or their efforts to achieve such (China, India, Brazil).

As George Will noted, the U.S. population in 2050 will have risen to 420 million, which means that if we honor Obama’s pledge to reduce our nation’s “carbon footprint” by then to 80% below 2005 levels, emissions per capita “will be about what they were in 1875.  That.  Will.  Not.  Happen.”

Even climate change alarmists admit that pledges hinted at by Obama for Copenhagen and outlined in the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House this summer will have barely any effect on the earth’s climate.

And even if Obama decided to place some of his rapidly swelling political capital on the line and make a pledge for emissions reductions at Copenhagen, it wouldn’t be legally binding, because any treaty must be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which has already demonstrated its hostility to the less ambitious Waxman-Markey bill.

If all of this isn’t promising enough, Copenhagen delegates’ support from their constituencies for making firm commitments to reduce emissions will be diluted by several other factors.  One is the laughable hypocrisy on display in conference attendees’ lavish, luxury-filled, CO2 emission-intensive accommodations and entertainments.  The UK Telegraph documents that the summit, including jet and limousine travel, “will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of ‘carbon dioxide equivalent,’” about the same as the daily emissions of 30 smaller countries.  This is even after Al Gore canceled his talk in Copenhagen and the extra fuel required to fly him there was subtracted from the total.

Another lacuna in the alarmists’ scheme is that little matter known as “Climategate,” or, the fallout at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia from a whistleblower having leaked thousands of e-mails and other files documenting climate change “scientists” manipulating data, losing data, being unable to reconstruct data, and doing everything but counting “dimpled chads” to make the numbers come out the way they wanted.

Even before Climategate, polls showed that a majority of Americans believed climate change was primarily due to natural and not human causes and that such beliefs have been growing more common in recent years.  Yet Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate official, is worried only about people’s “perception” of the e-mails, not whether they reveal compromised data analysis.  Of the general public, he patronizingly states, “[W]hen they have the feeling… that scientists are manipulating information in a certain direction, then of course it causes concern in a number of people to say, ‘You see, I told you so, this is not a real issue.’”  Yes, Yvo—when people realize that the UN’s top climate official cares more about whether the little people discover the truth than he cares about discovering the truth, it does cast climate change alarmists in a suspicious light.

Then of course there’s the science, which is too complex for most non-climate scientists to follow (and now, we know, most climate scientists), but which infiltrates the public’s awareness from time to time, due to the efforts of honest climate scientists and tireless, usually unpaid fact-checkers, statisticians, and bloggers.  For example, these skeptics have helped publicize the well-documented Medieval Warming Period, during which temperatures were hotter than they are today, yet SUVs were still only in the test market phase.

Those over 40 remember the international scientific “consensus” in the early 1970s that the planet was cooling at an alarming rate and that humans were careening toward the next Ice Age.  More recently, those over 15 remember the catastrophic, government-fueled, technology-related Y2K predictions, none of which came true.  (Those over 9 months remember Obama’s promise that if we didn’t pass the $787 billion stimulus bill, unemployment might someday soar all the way to 8.0%.)

Acting in concert with Obama, the EPA on Monday released a declaration of intent to regulate and require permits from the largest U.S. emitters.  The timing of the announcement on the first day of the Copenhagen conference, which was a total coincidence, was meant to goad Congressmen into passing cap-and-trade legislation, lest the EPA effectively do it for them.

This usurpation of the legislature’s function is not sitting well with many in Congress, including even such Democrats and moderate Republicans as Russ Feingold, Blanche Lincoln, Byron Dorgan, and Olympia Snowe.  The working and middle classes will be none too happy, either: as Forbes’ Joel Kotkin notes, “Huge increases in energy costs, taxes and a spate of regulatory mandates will restrict their access to everything from single-family housing and personal mobility to employment in carbon-intensive industries like construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture.”  Who ever said Democrats don’t look out for the little guy!

So Monday’s EPA ruling does not help, but actually undermines, any Copenhagen pledge in two ways: (1) the ruling undercuts the necessity of Obama’s making any public commitment in Copenhagen, because it allows the administration to enact its schemes more stealthily, yet (2) the ruling will not withstand the inevitable, prolonged legal challenges from every corner of society, or the public’s anger at an administration that would allow such an authoritarian agency to make this ruling, which will undermine the administration’s ability to carry out any pledge it makes at Copenhagen.  Paradoxically, Obama’s best prospect for restricting carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. is rescinding the EPA ruling and making no promises in Copenhagen, and taking his chances with Congress next year.

So in case it’s still not obvious to some, I’ll repeat it: Copenhagen will be a monumental failure on every level.

Bonus revelation: It deserves to be.

If you, like most Americans, doubt that scientists will ever demonstrate a direct causal link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, try wrapping your mind around any of the following deeply implausible scenarios in the wake of the recent Climategate scandal:

(1) The Climate Research Unit at the UK’s University of East Anglia, origin of the thousands of pages of leaked e-mails and computer code two weeks ago, will honor requests to release the CRU data used to produce results showing steady global temperature increases over the past 150 years.

Phil Jones, head of CRU, who resigned yesterday in light of the fraud, once e-mailed U.S. colleague Michael Mann, “[D]on’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them…  If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone…  We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

(2) The CRU physically possesses the data it has collected over the years and the programs used to generate its previously published results, or can figure out how to reproduce these programs.

Here are a few nuggets from the infamous “HARRY_READ_ME” text file containing three years’ worth of notes (2006-2009) documenting one CRU scientist’s attempt to reconstruct published temperature data using the center’s poorly documented datasets and computer code:

“I immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for completely unfathomable reasons, didn’t include months! So we read 50 grids instead of 600!!!”

“Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names…  [T]he filenames… are identical, but the contents are not.”

“I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases.  There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

“I am seriously close to giving up, again.  The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before my head hurts and I have to stop.  Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions…  I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections.”

(3) Phil Jones will come up with a convincing explanation for how his e-mail describing use of “Mike’s trick” to “hide the decline” references anything other than fraudulent manipulation of data to achieve a desired outcome.

The e-mail in question: “’I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline.”

Jones’ response to the leak: “The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste.”  Note to Jones: So was your lame defense of that shifty e-mail.

The defense offered by Michael Mann, originator of the long-discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature increase, was not much better: Mann claimed that the word “trick” referred to a clever method of solving a problem “and not something secret.”  Not anymore, it’s not!

(4) The University of East Anglia, the BBC, and the international mainstream media will get more agitated about the implications of the hacked CRU e-mails than the fact that they were hacked.

The criminal penalties lying in wait for the scientists who conspired to alter, misrepresent, or delete data after FOIA requests, while spending millions in public grant money, are far greater than for the hacker who obtained the e-mails.  The implications of falsified data for global climate change regulations, taxes, and government takeover of industrial economies render the hacker’s moral breech moot.

(5) The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin and other environmental “reporters” will admit Climategate is a big deal.

The CRU is one of two centers that compile global land temperature data; the other is the U.S. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Roughly 50% of terrestrial temperature data has thus been demonstrated to be worthless—more than 50%, if you take into account the greater weight given the CRU data in the IPCC report, the close working relationship between the centers, and the documented bias and possible fraud in U.S. data.  Yet Revkin claims, “The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.”  Case closed!

(6) Climategate will backfire against skeptics.

Kenneth Trenberth, CRU crony and researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, insists—hold your laughter—that the hacked e-mails demonstrate “the integrity of scientists.”  Even George “Moonbat” Monbiot, global warming columnist for the UK Guardian—who bitterly wrote, “I apologise.  I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed.  I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely”—was ludicrously recalcitrant in his support for CRU researchers: “By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow.”

(7) Any climate change alarmists other than Monbiot will apologize for putting too much credence in CRU data without being able to independently verify it.

The shills at RealClimate.org, for example, write: “There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research… no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist-communist-vegetarian overlords.”  Apology accepted!

(8) Global warming alarmists will view the halt in statistically significant global warming over the last 15 years, the demonstrable global cooling over the last 9 years, and the projected global cooling over the next several decades by skeptics whose models correctly predicted both of the above, as evidence that might prove their climate change theories wrong.

See all of the above.