When the news is bad, change the subject

The first rule of political spin is that in response to bad news it's easier to change the subject rather than address the embarassing issue of importance. Therefore, if defending the Climategate scandal, it's best to point fingers at the "criminal hackers," rather than allow people to talk about the biggest scientific fraud of the decade. And to use the terms "criminal" and "hackers" rather than "whistleblower." Do this in spite of all the evidence that whoever prepared the archive obviously spent a lot of time weeding through countless emails unrelated to climategate and only provided pertinent material. There is not one single wedding invitation, spam email, family email, etc. in the archive. There are hundreds of program and data files pertaining to the flawed hockey stick paper(s) and corruption of the scientific method. All of this points to whoever put this together was someone inside CRU who knew exactly what to look for and where to find it and post a link. In fact, the note on The Air Vent blog where this archive was first discovered on the internet said that the issue of global warming was too important to not get this information out and specifically mentioned particular emails. All of which points to this archive originating from a CRU insider and whistleblower. There's no evidence the emails were obtained by hackers. In all probability, they were either left on a public FTP by mistake, having been gathered up somewhere prior to deletion, or they were leaked by someone on the inside. Either way, whoever was responsible should be awarded the Nobel prize, preferably one taken out of the hands of Al Gore

Changing the topic is the spin tactic used by Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and other AGW supporters upon the initial news of the climategate scandal, i.e. the only thing to pursue here is the criminal hackers, move along, nothing else to see here. Now, two weeks after the scandal first broke, comes California Senator Barbara Boxer, GW alarmist, changing the subject. "You call it 'Climategate'; I call it 'E-mail-theft-gate,'" she said during a committee meeting, using her political skills to once again change the subject.