Great Writing From One of Our Favorites

Lileks' latest Screedblog is too damn funny not to provide a link...

What caused the Pakistan earthquakes? If you trust Venezuela’s Castro-wannabe Hugo Chavez, it was the free market. Adam Smith’s invisible hand, flipping mankind the bird. The "world global capitalist model,” Chavez insisted, “… is destroying the world. The world is in danger. Never has there been such disasters, hurricanes, droughts, torrential rains. Incredible! The world is dangerously off balance."

By this theory, Gaia is mad at us because we cut down trees and buy sneakers. Gaia is peeved because people want to drive to work in offices heated by nuclear power. We should all push a donkey cart up a rutted road and sit in the market all day waiting for someone to buy our withered tubers, so we can buy a small piece of burlap soaked in sugar to feed our nine children. Gaia hates capitalism.

Chavez, of course, believes none of this; if he opposed this “unbalanced” world he’d cap the oil wells and command his people to burn dung. it’s just the latest stick with which the internationalist left can thwap the piñata of the rich free West. It gets Chavez closer to the day when college students, yearning to poke a thumb in dad’s eye, will dump the Che T-shirt for one with Hugo’s mug.

...If Chavez’ opportunistic eco-twaddle smacks of the sort of religious eschatology you get from Pat Robertson, it should. The pious leftism of the international nomenklatura is a religion. The United States may not be their Great Satan, but it’s the devil they know. The bureaucrats and the EU anointed are the priesthood - and the Nobel peace prize is the means of bestowing sainthood.

Which brings us to its latest recipient: ol’ see-no-evil Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is like giving the Surgeon General the Nobel Price for medicine after bird flu depopulates the North American continent.

I only wish I could write like that. Read the whole thing.