Simply Politics & News

[Paule]

A nation of wusses!


My friends, America has become a nation of wusses. If anybody doubts, you simply have to review the last four days of the National Weather Service's Wild Guess 2001. We were going to have more than two feet of snow in New York City - maybe more! Six hundred flights into and out of New York City were cancelled. Every TV network on Monday showed scenes where there was no snow and gravely said "the worst is yet to come."

But they told us by noon on Sunday the entire Eastern Seaboard would be paralyzed. Yet when the National Weather Service reported that the snow line had moved up to Massachusetts, and that this was going to be a rain event, the media kept up with the hype.

Suddenly, we were told that we had to watch out for beach erosion. "Snowflake 2001" is a totally phony ratings drama about an average storm. It's turning out to be one of the most insignificant, inconsequential snowfalls in history, yet all during the day Monday it was still being reported as one of "potentially the deadliest."

As early as Saturday or Sunday, I was telling people, "You watch, this isn't going to materialize, anything. This forecast, too dramatic. Here it is, still 48 hours away, and they're talking about this as The Storm of the Century? There's not enough here to indicate that yet." When was the last storm the cable news channels didn't name "The Storm of the Century", anyway? They're all The Storm of the Century!

I received a great e-mail from a lawyer in Illinois who wrote, "Rush, it's the seriousness of the forecast that matters here. The charge is so serious, we must take this storm seriously." This points out the hypocrisy perfectly, folks. It's not the facts, it's the charge that matters.






Some of you are saying, "Rush, you're making too big a deal of this. It's better to be forewarned and have it not to be as bad than to miss it entirely and be swamped." But that doesn't justify the panic that's been created, the looting of stores because people are being told they'll be snowed in for days. No wonder America is becoming a nation of bumbling, fat slobs.

I was out playing golf on Saturday, and down where I live, it's been 87 degrees for the past month, and I was going to go to New York on Sunday, because I had some business to attend to. Then I caught this weather forecast, and, if I believed what I was seeing, it was obvious that I shouldn't go. I happened to run into Donald Trump, because I was golfing on his course, and he said he was going to go back North early.

Trump said that this snowfall kills him in Atlantic City, because, if people think it's going to snow, they don't get on the roads and go there. The result? There were probably more journalists walking the boardwalk of Atlantic City on Monday than people, but there wasn't one drop of rain on the camera lens! The wind was barely blowing, so they were warning us that there might be a "high tide." So now the tides are cause for panic?


I can understand the need for weather forecasters to alert people and report what might happen. The National Weather Service has models, and they're bound by them because they don't want to get sued for missing a frost or a hurricane. But when you add the mix of the modern media to it, it makes us look like babies to all the world like babies.

Can you imagine how much would never have gotten done if current weather forecasting techniques and reporting had been in place during the nation's founding or World War II? We'd have never invaded on D-Day. Lewis & Clark would have said, "The hell with it! It's going to snow, I'm not going."

Even the diaries of the ill-fated Donner Party only made one reference to the weather, writing that it was "an unusually cold winter." That was as close to complaining as they did, and they were driven to cannibalism by the weather! Now what happens? Four inches of snow and a little rain, and we're just paralyzed. We board up airports, schools and businesses. It just boggles the mind.

The way this non-storm is being reported brings to mind the panic created whenever you hear dire predictions about global warming. Our best scientists can't tell us what's going to happen on Manhattan island tomorrow, yet they presume to tell us how much the entire globe will warm up - to the tenth degree - in the year 3200. Remember this the next time you hear some end-of-the-world, doom-and-gloom type tell you about the temperature in the next century and all the calamities associated with it.


Maybe it sounds like I'm bashing meteorologists, but I'm really talking about the media coverage, and this public attitude that says we're supposed to panic over every little challenge. So even if it does snow 12 inches this week? That happened all the time when I was a kid, and sometimes they didn't even cancel school. Now they cancel school over forecasts of four inches, before one flake falls.

What bothers me about it is what bunch of softies we appear to have become. Twelve inches of snowfall ought not cause panic and become the topic of the conversation for hours and hours and hours. It's the weather, for crying out loud! Can you imagine if this kind of panic occurred in the ski resort areas of this country?

It used to be that the forecast of dangerous weather was done for one reason, and that was safety. Now it's a moneymaking thing. We have logos, theme songs, icons and special coverage: "You Will Die from This Snowstorm - Brought to You by Vick's. If you're one of the few who does live through this winter Armageddon, you'll at least get a cold, so take these throat lozenges."

I'm not turning anti-capitalist. I'm just against this journalism trend where accuracy is a casualty of the war to get and hold an audience, and then the fall-back position is, "Well, would you rather have us really get it wrong on the positive side or really blow it and have everybody in deep trouble?"

It doesn't have to be that extreme a choice, folks. The media should report the news, and when a huge storm is predicted but fizzles, they should report that too - not keep the story alive "in case" it still happens, then claim victory when it doesn't. By that logic, they'll be predicting "The Storm of the Century" every single day.