The plan worked perfectly. Having caught Brer Rabbit with a tar baby, Brer Fox had only to decide what hideous means he would use to do away with him.
But Brer Rabbit was too smart for him. "Do whatever horrible thing you want," he pleaded, “but please don't throw me in that briar patch."
Brer Fox did exactly that and Brer Rabbit emerged from the briars clean as a whistle and free as a bird.
We're pretty certain that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse never heard the story of Brer Rabbit. If they had, they've clearly forgotten it or failed to learn one of its obvious implications: don't give your opponent the opportunity to turn the tables on you.
This is exactly what they've done with their campaign to prosecute dissenters of so-called climate change (aka “global warming”), but they're not as smart as they think they are.
“If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration,” observe Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 12 other state AGs in a letter to their peers, urging them to renounce this misuse of their prosecutorial powers. “If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud.”
Exactly. The real fraudsters may be the ones who have been trying for years to get the theory of global warming accepted as fact – through propaganda, blandishments, coercion, ostracism, and now possible abuse of the courts.
If Schneiderman, Whitehouse and the vested multibillion-dollar interests they represent succeed in making opinions on climate change a matter of fraud, they could wind up being the ones prosecuted.