Bob Marshall; The Conservationist; Field & Stream
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Like most people, I’m a big fan of shooting the messenger. It feels good, changes the subject, and relieves you from questioning your most deeply held and unexamined beliefs.

For my money, there’s no riper candidate for messenger-shooting than one Bob Marshall, who writes this site’s Conservationist blog, which is subtitled—this kills me—Standing Up for Our Right to the Outdoors.

Yeah, right.

Marshall—or “Comrade Marshall,” as one commenter astutely names him—wrote for the New Orleans Times-Picayune for many years. I actually saw his business card once. We were both covering a picnic sponsored by Communists for Flag Burning, Gay Rights, and Welfare for Illegal Aliens. Underneath his name on the card was a single word: Journalist. This, of course, is code for Climate-Change-Believing, Gun-Grabbing, Big-Government-Loving Shill.

Like all muckraking members of the fourth estate, Marshall pretends that he’s all about the facts. In a July 18 post, “Research Shows Climate Change is Already Affecting Gamefish,” he even writes, “Fair warning…the figures reported in the studies [four papers reviewing 31 research projects] are facts, not suspicions.”

Fortunately, most readers—not all, but enough to shout down the morons who disagree with them—are too smart to fall for this. Here are some examples of their responses:

• “Bob is a firm believer in big government. I suspect that he is a superdelegate for Hillary. He should have a D after his name in the byline.”

• “He wants all of your guns taken away so he and his fellow tree-huggers can go out and pet all the wild animals.”

• “If there was ever an example of ‘Socialism on Parade’, come here and read the ‘Hal ‘n Bobs’!” Which is an unusual way of referring to Marshall and the blog’s other author, Hal Herring.

• “Also find it interesting the 2nd Amendment was not only not mentioned but neither was gun ownership nor gun rights!?” To be fair, the blog was about legislation affecting public air, lands, and waters, about the wilderness system, etc. But does that mean he couldn’t have worked in at least a mention of gun rights? I think not. And don’t tell me that was an accident.

What’s surprising is that Marshall has been pulling the wool over our eyes for 40 years. At the Times-Picayune, he was part of a three-man team that won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles examining the plight of the world’s fisheries. He also contributed to a series examining missteps by the Corps of Engineers’ building of levees and floodwalls in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. That won a Pulitzer, too. Interesting that one was for siding with cute little fishies against honest industry and the other for opposing an arm of big government. That’s pure Bob.

He’s slick, you have to give him that. Here’s fair warning to you, Comrade Marshall. You can’t hide behind the facts forever.