James Delingpole – Pants On Fire

At last, after all those years of being ridiculed for peddling easily debunked rubbish on, well, any issue on which he voiced an opinion, James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole appeared to have a real and authoritative report from the US Senate, and from the Committee on Environment and Public Works, no less, that revealed the terrible truth about Big Green.

"Gay marriage" ... "Global warming" ... "Eco crucifixes" ... "Red meat conservatism" ... "Declining credibility" ... "Unintentional hilarity"

“SHOCK US SENATE REPORT: LEFT WING ‘BILLIONAIRE’S CLUB’ USING GREEN GROUPS TO SUBVERT DEMOCRACY, CONTROL THE ECONOMY” told Del Boy on his blog, which in turn referred to an article authored by Himself Personally Now at the batshit collective that is Breitbart London. And the Senate report appeared no less damning, from its title page onwards.

“The Chain of Environmental Command – How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA” it proclaimed. But then, a look at the narrative shows that there is a fixation on certain organisations, notably the Tides Foundation. This nonprofit, based in San Francisco, was a frequent target of one cable news host’s conspiracy theories.

That host was Glenn Beck, at the time a regular fixture on Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse). Beck’s ranting was thought to be the trigger that set Byron Williams on his way, tooled up with a small arsenal of weaponry, to kill “people of importance” at Tides. Fortunately, Williams had been drinking, his driving was erratic, he was pulled over, and after an exchange of gunfire, arrested.

Back at Del Boy’s favoured report, some of the citations are positively eyebrow-raising: highly conservative press outlets and bodies such as the Washington Times, Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller and Fox News are among these, while anyone not on the right is classified “far-left” at the outset and lumped in with the grand conspiracy the report is trying to attack.

Then there is the frequent appearance in the citations list of David Vitter, the junior Senator from Louisiana, and a Republican. One look at the report front page reveals the name of his staffer David Bolar. And then the word MINORITY comes clear: this is Vitter spending public resources riding a hobby-horse. What’s more, the source of Delingpole’s supposedly smoking gun has a poor recent track record.

Vitter “had the lowest batting average in the Senate during the 113th Congress, according to a Brookings Institution report that compared lawmakers' success to baseball players ... [he] he proposed 61 bills, but had a 0.000 batting average because none of his legislation was passed into law”. Perhaps he would have done better if he hadn’t been wasting taxpayer funds on conspiracy theories.

Del Boy’s smoke isn’t from a gun – it’s from his blazing trousers. No change there.