The Right Wing's Dumbing Down Of Weather

From yesterday's Rush Limbaugh show...

RUSH: Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill-seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain, El Rushbo back at it, in the saddle, ready for broadcast excellence, a full week of it here. (interruption) Why wouldn't it be a full week? What, are you thinking an earthquake or something is gonna happen? Was there a hurricane? That was a hurricane? Really? They called it a hurricane. I gotta be very, very careful about this because Vermont is flooded. For you people that haven't heard of it, Vermont is a state, and there's a city there called Montpelier, and it's underwater, and Brattleboro is underwater. This is more of a flooding and power outage storm than it was a windstorm.

People look over the damage to Sue and Jack Holloway's home in the Nassau Station development in Lewis, Del. on August 28, 2011. (Suchat Pederson/The News Journal/AP)#

Some guy did something interesting and I decided to check it myself. He's a doubter, and he's watching the reports of 75 to 85 to a hundred-mile-an-hour winds in Virginia and North Carolina. So he went to the Weather Underground site, and he went to a bunch of cities and towns that were where the hurricane was, and the highest wind speed he could find was 33-miles-an-hour, while they're reporting 75 to 85 to 95-mile-an-hour winds.

So I said, "I'm gonna check myself." I went to Weather Underground and I went to places like New Bern, North Carolina, and Goldsboro, North Carolina, Virginia Beach, and, lo and behold, the guy was right. I found a town where the wind was eight miles an hour while they were reporting hurricane winds of in excess of 80 miles an hour.

Casey and Denise Robinson clear out their destroyed beach home in the Sandbridge area of Virginia Beach, Va. on August 28, 2011, the day after Hurricane Irene moved through. Officials speculate that a tornado swept through the area.

There wasn't any wind. It was a rainstorm and there was a lot of flooding and there were deaths associated with it, but the hype, folks, I'll tell you what this was. It was a lesson, if you pay any attention to this, the hype, the desire for chaos, I mean literally, the media desire for chaos was a great learning tool, this was a great illustration of how all of the rest of the media in news, in sports, has templates and narratives and exaggerates beyond reality, creating fear so as to create interest.

Janie Gibbs helps clean up a friend's destroyed home on August 28, 2011 after it was hit by Hurricane Irene in Columbia, N.C. (John Bazemore/AP)

These photos came from a huge collection at the Boston Globe that is probably nothing more than another liberal media conspiracy of things that never happened. Try as I might, I'm unable to come up with a reason why Rush refuses to believe that Hurricane Irene wasn't a hurricane but rather something conjured up by the liberal media and President Obama.

But then again, I don't understand this either.

As Hurricane Irene bears down on the East Coast, news stations bombard our televisions with constant updates from the National Hurricane Center.

While Americans ought to prepare for the coming storm, federal dollars need not subsidize their preparations. Although it might sound outrageous, the truth is that the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Weather Service, are relics from America’s past that have actually outlived their usefulness.

[...]

The NWS claims that it supports industries like aviation and shipping, but if they provide a valuable contribution to business, it stands to reason business would willingly support their services. If that is the case, the Service is just corporate welfare. If they would not, it is just a waste.

As for hurricanes, the insurance industry has a compelling interest in understanding them. In a world without a National Weather Service, the insurance industry would probably have sponsored something very like the National Hurricane Center at one or more universities. Those replacements would also not be exploited for political purposes.

[...]

NWS services can and are better provided by the private sector. Americans will invest in weather forecasting because if there is one thing we can be certain of, people will want to protect their property and their lives.

I'm really not sure what I should laugh at first. The fact that Fox News is actually saying that the universities that they love to paint as liberal institutions would not be subject to political influences or their abject obtuseness when they have no idea that Americans are already investing in weather forecasting today every time they pay their taxes.

A hurricane is not a hurricane and we really don't need the National Weather Service or the National Hurricane Service are just the latest examples of why it's so dangerous to let Republicans near the control panel of this great country.

Didja hear that Al Gore is fat?



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