GOP Posts YouTube Vid Removing President’s Remarks on Climate Change
January 22, 2015
We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No longer just a war on science.
Tip to Climate Deniers. In the war between you and reality, in the long run, the smart money will be on reality.
In the short clip above, the painfully obvious edit occurs at about :40 seconds in.
The official website for House Republicans has posted on YouTube a version of President Obama’s State of the Union address which cuts out comments where the President was critical of Republican rhetoric on climate change, ThinkProgress has learned.
In the website’s “enhanced webcast” of the State of the Union speech, President Obama’s comments criticizing Republicans for saying they are “not scientists” when it comes to climate change are erased.
At the 43:25 minute mark, President Obama is supposed to say “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe.”
Instead, the entire section is skipped. Obama’s comments resume with “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.”
You can watch the gop.gov version of the video here.
FYI, according to Climate Progress, “Boehner’s Press Secretary Michael Steel told ThinkProgress Wednesday afternoon that the video edits were not intentionally made. “It was inadvertent.” Steel said via e-mail. “We are working with YouTube to figure out what happened.”
Well, I’m not a scientist, but I am a videographer, and a YouTuber. When I screw up a video, I don’t “work with YouTube” – I take it down and put up the correct version.
The Marx Brothers could not have staged this better.
…the entire passage is missing, with a painfully obvious skip in the words, and picks up only with Obama saying, “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.” Maybe they left that part in since it sounded like we could start bombing the climate if it refuses to comply with our demands.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
January 22, 2015 at 9:22 am
Standard Fox News fare. They regularly “edit” video to alter messages.
January 22, 2015 at 9:48 am
[…] https://climatecrocks.com/2015/01/22/gop-posts-youtube-vid-removing-presidents-remarks-on-climate-cha… […]
January 22, 2015 at 9:57 am
How many minutes were actually skipped?
January 22, 2015 at 11:10 am
“Working with YouTube to figure out what happened”? ROTFL. Those clowns owe me a fresh cup of coffee and a new keyboard!
Some time ago, I uploaded an incorrect version of a document that I was sharing with others.
When I realized my mistake, I didn’t tell the other folks, “I’m working with Google to find out what happened”.
I deleted the incorrect version and uploaded the correct version.
What’s so complicated about that?
Now of course, these are the same folks who for years haven’t been able to locate Michael Mann’s hockey-stick code/data or NOAA’s raw temperature data in spite of the fact that a 6th-grader could find it all easily with Google.
January 22, 2015 at 11:31 am
I wasn’t drinking coffee, so I didn’t ruin my keyboard when I read about this “inadvertent” ERROR and the laughable “working with Youtube to fix it” by the lying POS’s-SOB’s-A-holes that call themselves the GRAND OLD Party. My blood pressure went up, I cussed to myself, and I ground my teeth, though.
I hope I live long enough to see REALITY destroy the deniers and the Repugnants.
The Repugnant response to the SOU by that idiot Ernst showed how out of touch with reality they are, particularly her remarks about the Keystone XL. Here in the Washington DC area we are being inundated with radio and TV ads from the American Petroleum Institute touting the KXL as vital to America—-I am looking forward to Obama’s veto of any bill the Congress may send up. Something that folks in the hinterlands may not be aware of as much as those of us close to the “seat” of government is the fact that the Repugnants load the KXL bill and most anything else with all kinds of outrageous riders and amendments that themselves would produce a veto (forgetting all about tar sands).
January 22, 2015 at 11:52 am
Emblematic of the schizophrenia taking place with climate change in Congress is this news:
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/230316-senate-votes-98-1-that-climate-change-is-real
The vote is an amendment to the bill approving Keystone XL.
January 22, 2015 at 1:06 pm
I just watched a video of Inhofe’s response after the vote. More schizophrenia – me brain hurt now:
It’s seriously painful to watch. The Sheldon Whitehouse amendment doesn’t include the phrasing that recent climate change is caused by man, so Inhofe took that to mean along the lines that “the climate is always changing, therefore it’s real and not a hoax”. His rebuttal then follows along the lines that man-caused climate change is a hoax, that cap and trade would cost the U.S. $400-$500 billion a year, and that this would be passed on directly to the U.S. taxpayers, including his 20 grandchildren.
One little thing at the end – Inhofe says he’s going to make a bunch of the “skeptics” speak at future committee meetings.
Sheldon Whitehouse’s statement on the amendment:
January 22, 2015 at 1:09 pm
Inhofe:
January 23, 2015 at 2:46 am
Posted a reply on that video to a climate denier in Norway that frequent most of any climate change related news commentary fields. It’s so odd that they haven’t gotten any brighter over years of commenting, clearly not understanding even simple physics. I mean, how hard can it be to learn a bit about energy, CO2 molecule, oceans and the greenhouse effect? A lot of it is so basic physics and clearly demonstrable in some simple experiments.
Why do they go to such lengths disputing the science when its so clear that its political reasons for why they don’t like the science? It really only makes them sound more tinfoil hat than they deserve – as I really don’t think they actually believe their scientific claims, but just need some outlet to dispute the science as it goes against their political grain.
Has anyone had any experience in actually turning the mind of someone? I mean like, they suddenly “get it”? Or is the political side thing so embedded that they can’t even listen?
January 23, 2015 at 1:41 pm
“Why do they go to such lengths disputing the science when its so clear that its political reasons for why they don’t like the science?”
You touched on the reason at the end of your paragraph. They just have other beliefs that are more important to them. The main ones for climate change are economic and theological beliefs, as in “man-made climate change requires regulation, so man-made climate change can’t be real” and “God wouldn’t do this”. Some new to the discussion might be blinded by political affiliation, but wow, that’s a level of intellectual apathy that’s really hard to believe. Some might believe one way because their friends and family do, so it must be right.
The human mind rationalizes far more often than it is rational. In the above cases, the mind searches for the reasons why to not believe in man-made climate change after seeing the conflict with an established belief, and as there are many already out there with similar motives, they can find their rationalizations easily. Once established, it’s hard to shake, depending on the person. My experience is that very few have the intellectual bravery to really question core beliefs.
Inhofe himself provides an example directly in the video here. He says that he learned about climate change and was at first concerned. Then he found out how expensive it was. Then he searched for the reasons why man-made climate change must be wrong. It’s sloppy thinking, but it’s right there. “The science implies expense, so the science can’t be right.”
“Has anyone had any experience in actually turning the mind of someone? I mean like, they suddenly “get it”?”
Personally, I haven’t. I think there must be those out there who change their minds, but it doesn’t happen during debate. We’re so keyed into “winning” the debate that we ramp up the ability to poke holes in the other side while we lose the ability to think critically about our own position. A tragedy of the human condition is our limitation to understand beyond ourselves.
January 22, 2015 at 5:09 pm
“….YOU brain hurt now?…” I just watched the video of Inhofe and ME brain has just exploded like the aliens in Mars Attacks. It is more than “seriously painful” to watch. It is sad that the country has to suffer with this man until his increasing senility-dementia-ignorance forces his removal from office.
Listening to Inhofe’s insane babbling can be as deadly to rational human beings as Slim Whitman’s yodeling of Indian Love Song was to the Martians.
This Inhofe speech could be pared down into a good Saturday Night Live sketch. After the 6+ minutes of babbling at the start, he launches into a litany of “it’s all cooked up by THE UN”, PFTA numbers about the cost of cap and trade, a poll of WEATHERCASTERS, “cooked” emails from 1999 and 25-year old charts, AL GORE ETC, and “experts” like Heartland and Exxon Mobil favorite Richard Freakin’ Lindzen (who he is going to give a permanent chair and his own mike at committee meetings).
Yes, SNL could have a lot of fun with Inhofe and AGW. The only problem I see is that a large proportion of the public probably wouldn’t get the joke. They’re more concerned with shopping than AGW. They DO, after all, think we should build KCL
January 22, 2015 at 5:11 pm
KXL
January 22, 2015 at 6:49 pm
dumbo – the number of minutes is important. They tell either how much of the speech “hit home” or how long a time the President dedicated to something truly controversial.
As explained by the NYTimes, Obama’s problem is that for all the rhetoric he has little space to do anything. Maybe climate change is the one area where the Republicans don’t think the President has been isolated enough? Because for sure, the rest of the speech was good enough for them to repost.
January 22, 2015 at 10:56 pm
“He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” – Article II Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution.
Well the video of the president’s devotion to climate change within the State of the Union address is timed at two minutes forty one seconds, which is not bad as what began as a communication between president and Congress has become a communication between the president and the people of the United States. Not all people are Frasier watchers, and a full one hour lecture with clips from Messrs Alley and Archer may have turned them off. After all NASA delivered all you need to know in a 1 minute 35 second video (in haste before Ted Cruz takes over and starts censoring presumably).
January 23, 2015 at 6:37 am
[…] Below, President Obama has fun with it. “I’ll just pretend I can’t read.” The President’s mockery of the “I’m not a scientist” dodge stung so deeply that Speaker John Boehner excised that portion of the State of the Union address from the “official” Republican version posted on line, as has been noted here and elsewhere. […]
January 23, 2015 at 1:43 pm
Inhofe has a very good point.
The Democrats have no answer to his charge that addressing climate change will be too expensive. Or do they? No, they don’t.
January 23, 2015 at 2:38 pm
The sad thing is that the Democratic Party changed fundamentally from the 1970s to the 1990s. The old guard of the Dems, the remainders of the Roosevelt to LBJ era, were replaced with the new, and these new Democrats took their main lesson from the reasons for success of the Reagan era – accentuate the positive only, don’t question our foreign policy or economic agenda, and it’s the economy, stupid. From that point, making money became more important than social and more altruistic interests. President Clinton’s policies were about expanding the economy and maintaining U.S. economic interests abroad more than they were about protecting the interests of the lower classes, and those policies have remained the norm for Democrats to now.
The Democrats of today are really moderate Republicans from the 1970s. We essentially have two ‘conservative’ parties in charge of this country, and this has allowed those on the right to drift even further right, which in turn isolates and further erodes the power and policies of those on the left. Any dialogue about truly liberal policies is immediately negated by economic arguments.
We can’t have any other option, because to support a third party candidate is to “throw away your vote”.
There is no answer from the Democrats as to the expense of addressing climate change, because they view it as a losing political argument. It’s not about what’s right anymore.
Reinforcing it is the democracy destroying trend of campaign financing. In order to win elections now, both Republicans and Democrats must receive donations from very powerful interests, and in order to continue to receive those donations, they have to act if not directly for, then not against, those interests while elected. Moneyed interests are almost never for publicly-controlled utilities or social policies that benefit the masses over the accumulation of wealth privately. So, we don’t see such things nowadays. That era has passed, at least until we either break up the two-party system or fundamentally reform campaign financing, and neither are nowhere near priorities for either the Democrats or Republicans, not to mention our corporate media.