alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

April 19, 2006

Anne Applebaum: Tilting to the Right. Occasionally, Falling Over.

by AltHippo @ 2:20 pm. Filed under rhetorical fallacy, hacks

I really have no idea why the Washington Post-It-Note employs Anne Applebaum. Wait a minute, I kinda do. Perhaps it’s because she’s a supporter of Ollie North, and a critic of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Anne, and Fred Hiatt, Dr. Rathacker and the rest of the Postal editorial page probably get along.

I might even argue that Applebaum is a movement conservative in the guise of a columnist. For instance take this tidbit from Media Matters: (emphasis mine)

On December 13, 1994, The Washington Post reported that Applebaum and her husband, Radek Sikorski — who is a resident fellow and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and who has written for National Review and The American Spectator — are “solidly plugged into a transatlantic power grid of conservative editors, writers and politicians, and have a reputation for politically incorrect social mischief.”

Ms. Applebaum takes joy in her work. And, as far as I can see, her work is bashing various sects of liberalism. In this weeks rhetorical fallacy she hacks away at environmentalists in defense of her recently aquired fondness for windmills:

To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze.

But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a murderer of birds and bats. As for the still-young wind industry, it is “an environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a few truths and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of lies.” Far from being clean and green, “corporate wind is yet another extraction industry relying on false promises,” a “poster child for irresponsible development.”

Such attacks — those come from http://www.stopillwind.org/ , the Web site of Maryland anti-wind activist Jon Boone — are not atypical.

Not atypical? Not atypical of what? Not atypical of the red herrings she uses in her columns? I hope she doesn’t mean not atypical of the mainstream environmental movement. Though that seems to be where she’s going:

The anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales beside the opposition to liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade entirely beside the mass movement that will oppose a new nuclear power plant.

Those environmental whackos! They’re just anti-progress. If I didn’t already know that Applebaum thinks liberals hate America, I’d guess she thinks liberals hate America.

For the record: here’s the Sierra Club on windpower. Here’s the Mass. Adubon Society. Both are supportive. They are not atypical of the mainstream environmental movement.

Note also what Applebaum leaves out of her pablum, I mean column: the unbending struggle of the Bushies to prevent conservation: tax deductions for guzzling SUV’s, refusing to raise car efficiency standards, or just having his boss, Dick Cheney, say that conservation is a personal choice but not part of his energy policy.

Update: No sooner did I post the above when I got this from GreenPeace about Mitt Romney’s opposition to the Cape Wind project.

Bookmark on del.icio.us

3 Responses to “Anne Applebaum: Tilting to the Right. Occasionally, Falling Over.”

  1. frank crane Says:
    April 19th, 2006 at 3:36 pm

    Hi, Applebaum assumes wind-energy can be harvested by simply putting up the wind mills. That is a wrong notion.

    Just as you can drill for oil only where there is oil, you can harvest wind energy only where there is wind.

    A quick look at a USGS wind map will tell you that all the places she mentions are not viable sites for generating wind power.

    Hate to say this but journalists (and columnists) need to understand science before making editorial statements.

  2. tas Says:
    April 21st, 2006 at 10:02 am

    You forgot the best part of this column, about bananas. Because taking a stance against nuclear energy apparently makes one crazy, since nuclear sources have always provided us with cheap, clean energy!

    One has to be amazed at the fact that Applebaum gets paid to write.

  3. AltHippo Says:
    April 21st, 2006 at 10:11 am

    “One has to be amazed at the fact that Applebaum gets paid to write.”

    My point, exactly. I can think of about a dozen underpaid bloggers whose work I greatly prefer to Ms. Applebaum’s. Unfortunately, they’re not plugged into the affirmative action for neocons network.

Leave a Reply

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.
Anti-Spam Image

« The Fourth Estate
The Hitchens & Hewitt Comedy Hour »

[powered by WordPress.]

hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

contact

TBA 2008

The Alternative Hypothesis

the elephants of anwr

issues and insight

capitolists

alt media

sounds

critical resources

flora and fauna

law & order

events

cinema

literati

propaganda

use with extreme caution

internal links:

categories:

search blog:

archives:

April 2006
M T W T F S S
« Mar   May »
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

other:

95. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

comments

Recent Comments

HippoWire

  • Recent Trackbacks:

    • 27 queries. 0.440 seconds