Green is the new Red.

My daughter the Girl Scout went out tree planting with her troop yesterday. Nothing wrong with that. I like trees. I like them for their shade, their ability to mitigate the wind, and their gifts of nuts (Pecan trees) and wood (most trees). Trees are good, especially in this God-forsaken Hell’s Half-Acre we call Amarillo (Centrally-Located Between Two Oceans™!). Problem is, the Scout troop was just a part of a much larger contingent, all of which were wrapped up (literally – they got green TShirts) in a big, Liberal, PR event, “Green Select.”

Give me a friggin’ break.

Leave it to the Progressives to turn a wholesome, civic-minded activity like planting trees in a barren park into yet another excuse to excoriate humanity for having the unmitigated audacity to exhale carbon dioxide. Sheesh. The Scouts were regaled with speeches about “green” this and “carbon” that, and told to be good little citizens and do things to help save our planet. Nobody bothered to ask our planet if it needed saving, or even wanted our help.

Here’s the thing. I’m a marketing guy. I’m sensitive to marketing, especially the kind that pretends to be anything BUT marketing. I’m intensely aware of when somebody’s spinning something to make a point. My B.S. detector is a finely-honed instrument, atuned to the sound of spinmeisters doing their damndest to get everybody and their dog to jump on the crisis du jour’s bandwagon. Lemme tell you, my B.S. meter has been going nuts lately, over the Greening of America.

Recently, the New York Times broke a story about how a Progressive Think Tank had commissioned a bunch of marketing and branding types to analyze what the Green movement was doing wrong, and how to rebrand the message so people would get on-board with the movement. (Pause with me for a nano-second whilst we ponder the idea that the New York Times, the newspaper of record for leftwing wingnuts everywhere, had the stones to break a story that didn’t paint the Green movement in the proper reverential light. I’m still scratching my head over that one.)

The Progressives believe that the problem with their branding – not their product. They believe that terms like “global warming” and “carbon footprint” are turning people off. They suggest that, instead, they talk about “climate crisis,” “deteriorating atmosphere,” and “cap and cash back.” Um…not so much. I think instead, the problem is that people have gotten a whiff of what’s behind the rhetoric, and they can tell a pig in a poke, no matter how much lipstick you put on it.

You see, no matter which way you slice it, when you propose taxing carbon-based fuel usage to “encourage” alternative forms of energy, people twig to the fact that (especially when other forms of energy are not available) it’s gonna cost them money. Funny, with the economy suffering under the first wave of Obamanomics, most people I know are freaked about money and are skittish about ANY kind of tax increase. In fact, in a recent survey, the environment came in close to last place when ranked with other issues like “the economy,” “the recession,” and “homeland security.”

You can call it whatever you want, but eventually, people are going to realize that the “Global Warming” is another name for “Summer” just like “Global Cooling” is a synonym for “Winter,” and not something to get worked up about. Thanks to the time lag between research data and current events, it turns out that the planet has been cooling for the past ten years. Oh, and the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps have been growing, not shrinking. And Al Gore is still a pompous, lying ass. (But you probably already knew that last one.) There’s a name for this kind of double-speak, and a well-know group that used it to retain and grow their power. We call them Communists, and they made a complete cock-up of the (former) Soviet Union by the use of euphemisms on steroids. While the U.S.S.R. may have joined the History Team, the underpinnings of their government has not. That same kind of philosophy has found a place in the heart of the Liberal theology. And Liberals, sensing that the very word “liberal” has become a dirty word, have rebranded themselves “Progressives.” (One hopes that a citizen or two might crack a history book and find out what progressive means in it’s historical, classical context, but then if they did, the liberals would have to find another word to ruin.)

Will rebranding save the Green movement. I hope not. While it’s a great and noble thing to plant a tree, taxing us into the Dark Ages in the name of saving the planet is not. When government and special-interest groups start parsing words to hide the true meanings of their actions, it becomes easy to see how the Green movement is not too far removed from the Red Menace.