Caption: Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Caption: A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005
Hmmm.
It’s always interesting to me when someone I admire so clearly gets something wrong. A recent post by Robert Kennedy Jr. at the Huffington Post links the devastating hurricane that impacted the South to the global warming policies of Republicans, specifically Mississippis’s governor, Haley Barbour.
In the broad sense, of course, he is right. Global warming does have a demonstrated impact on devastating environmental problems, as as he points out, scientists are making that connection more clear each day.
However,the disappointment is that his argument relies on the same appeal to emotion over science that he so correctly faulted the Bush Administraion for–when it decided not to pursue emissions reductions. To suggest that this particular hurricane was caused by a less than 1o year old policy is facile and absurd logic–the kind of pseudo-logic that conservatives use when they claim a cold winter day proves that global warming isn’t real. Kennedy is sophisticated enough to know that global climate changes are much more complex than that, and his argument suffers as a result of the decision to go for such a simple explanation.
Perhaps, more importantly, it sends a message about environmentalism that Republicans will no doubt exploit. I am certain that these remarks will be featured on Limbaugh by the end of the week, and O’Reilly by the end of the evening. Kennedy has to be savvy enough to know that the Right has succeeded in painting environmentalism as radical by distorting and exploiting comments by environmentalists; the damage will only be more significant when the comments have come from such a respected mainstream environmental figure.
Once again, I fear that the Right will win this rhetorical debate. By invoking pious prayers to God and making hollow promises to rebuild, Bush and the Republicans will be perceived as caring about the common person more–while the media will ignore that a great deal of the devastation was certainly the result of the endemic poverty in Mississippi and Alabama–poverty that Republican policies have helped perpetuate.
We on the left need to recapture the rhetorical high ground because our positions on poverty and assistance to the poor are morally superior, and dare I say, Christian.
Oh, how presidential politics can destroy someone that I used to respect.
Remember the John McCain of 2000?
The day before Virginia’s GOP primary, John McCain accused some in his party of pandering to Christian right leaders “on the outer reaches of American politics.”
Ah, now it appears that Mr. Straight Talk himself is one of those pandering to those very leaders. Consider his newfound stance on gay marriage and intelligent design:
More than a year before the general election, U.S. Sen. John McCain is backing an initiative that would change Arizona’s Constitution to ban gay marriages and deny government benefits to unmarried couples.
The Republican senator is the most prominent Arizonan to add his voice to what has become a flurry of measures competing for a place on the state’s Nov. 7, 2006, ballot.
A McCain staffer said it was the first time the senator had been formally asked to support the marriage amendment and the first chance he had to meet with supporters.
The amendment “would allow the people of Arizona to decide on the definition of marriage in our state,” McCain said in a statement Thursday.
On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.
McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes “all points of view” should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.
Now, I’ll give McCain some credit for standing up against Bush’s idea of a federal constitutional amendment on gay marriage last year. But Arizona’s amendment is even worse; not only does it ban marriage between consenting adults of the same sex, but seems to create a pre-emptive strike on civil unions (as well as heterosexual relationships not under the umbrella of marriage).
And the ID stuff- well, I won’t go into detail there because it’s been discussed on this site previously. But suffice it to say, treating such pseudo-science as a legitimate scientific point of view suitable for the classroom certainly is pandering to those “on the outer reaches of American politics”.
I know many Democrats, myself included, who felt that McCain was one of the few Republicans who could be a voice against the extremists of his party. I guess I’ll have to live with the disappointment.
I keep hearing about the way the Left and Cindy Sheehan are politicizing the deaths of soliders in Iraq, but then I read stories like this from the AP today, which makes the point that even the tombstones of our dead soliders are being politicized by the Pentagon. The families of soliders, who should have final approval of what appears on headstones are often not being given the option to exclude the political title from the headstone, which are part of the Pentagon’s “War is Awesome” campaign, dating from the 1980s.
Nadia and Robert McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said “Operation Iraqi Freedom” ended up on his government-supplied headstone in Oceanside, Calif., without family approval.
“I was a little taken aback,” Robert McCaffrey said, describing his reaction when he first saw the operation name on Patrick’s tombstone. “They certainly didn’t ask my wife; they didn’t ask me.” He said Patrick’s widow told him she had not been asked either.
“In one way, I feel it’s taking advantage to a small degree,” McCaffrey said. “Patrick did not want to be there, that is a definite fact.”
I’m surprised that we are even allowed to see photographs of the cemetaries.
A great post by Wulfgar about the lack of specificity among the Democratic candidates seeking to unseat the Senator for the Saginaw Chippewas, Conrad Burns. He highlights one of the problems I am having in choosing a candidate to support–I don’t really have a great reason to support one of the front-runners based on the information they have given me.
The real catch, of course, is the balance between idealism and pragmatism. Based on what I know, Paul Richards is the candidate I should support, but I know that he is less electable than Tester or Morrison. But I refuse to support a candiate just for the sake of electing a Democrat. I’ve held my nose and voted for Max Baucus–only to find myself disappointed each time.
So, can someone convince me that Tester or Morrison are more than “better than Burns”? That’s a pretty low bar, and I think Montana deserves more.
Feel free to respond here or drop an e-mail.
Mark Noonan, over at Blogs for Bush, is concerned about the recent Alaska trip made by John McCain and Hillary Clinton–and its implications for spending on global warming. The article cites a claim in the Irish Independent that bring global warming to and end will cost half the world’s GDP…no warrant, no support, but a heck of a sound bite.
And then Noonan lays out the compelling argument that:
As I’ve said before: We are still not entirely sure if the world really is warming up; if the world is warming up, we are not entirely sure if human agency is even partially responsible; if the world is warming and humans are even partially responsible, there is nothing we can do – short of mass suicide – to even slightly slow down the effects
Note the lack of citation. In his expert role as a politco, he knows that we cannot be certain about global warming. And then there is Ian Murray at the National Review, who nakedly admits that:
Senator McCain should stop hiding behind the science
The comments on the site are even better, repeating the argument that “there is no conclusive evidence”, “no reputable scientist will sign up to the Global Warming Scam”, and my favorite, “Bob”‘s insight that, “I have long believed that the global warming is due more to climate changes than human activity.”
The point of including these comments is not entirely to mock pseudo-scientific stupidity. Not entirely. It gets to the larger issue of the Right’s willingness to repeat the same lies over and over again until enough people start to believe them.
Hell, even President Bush’S EPA believes that global warming is caused by humans, and that there are sensible steps individuals and countries can take to reduce their emissions. New Scientist.com (which probably includes a reputable scientist or two) says that “But most scientists believe we are under-estimating the dangers” of global warming, concluding in an editorial that:
The climate change conference suggests scientific peer pressure may have led to gross underestimates of the potential scale of global warming
THE good news for climate sceptics is that a speaker at a major British conference on climate change agreed that arch-sceptic Pat Michaels had a point. The bad news is that it was Myles Allen, the Oxford physicist who recently grabbed the headlines by suggesting that 11 °C of warming could be in the pipeline.
Allen was underlining what others had said off-platform: that the desire for consensus has too often led the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to don blinkers. This has not only blotted out the arguments of sceptics, but also sidelined results from climate models that keep producing “outlier” predictions of horrendous warming. As one scientist said last week: “by ignoring the outliers, IPCC has failed for 10 years to investigate the possible effects of more extreme climate change.”
Disdain for science and optimism that global warming will go away are not appropriate policies–and misleading the public with false information can only make the inevitable impact of global climate change worse.
