Al Gore lamely tried to justify selling Current to Al Jazeera on Jon Stewart last night, claiming that they provide “the highest quality, most extensive, best climate coverage of any network.”
Yes, we all think of Al Jazeera as our go-to source for climate change. And to think how distraught and inconsolable I was when Bush v. Gore was announced.
The GOP has been attacking Obama’s inauguration speech as partisan. I actually didn’t think it was particularly partisan, and neither did Newtie, so he and I agree on something, which is kind of creepy.
But what do they think a Romney speech would have been like? With Obama sitting there, Mittens would have declared that the country repudiated Obamacare and wanted less government spending, especially on social programs and entitlements, and less regulation and lower taxes. He would have said the country wanted the Ryan budget and privatization of Social Security and Medicare. He would have said his victory was a repudiation of everything from gay marriage to abortion rights to climate change. Given the failure to re-elect a sitting president, Mitt’s speech would inevitably have been highly, harshly partisan.
In attacking Obama’s speech, the GOP continues to blame their messenger, not their message, when the country soundly rejected both. Yes, Mitt was a terrible candidate who personified every negative stereotype and caricature of his party. But they still don’t get that they surrounded him with embarrassing nut jobs like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and that they forced him to sell a fringe platform. They still don’t get that if Mississippi rejected a Personhood Amendment, such an amendment is not mainstream. On this 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, new polls show that less than a quarter of Americans want it repealed. It’s the same on immigration and gay rights and the Ryan budget and the environment.
The GOP somehow is still convinced that while we didn’t like their guy, we like their policies. In attacking Obama’s speech, they fail to accept that we like both him and the sentiments he expressed on Monday.
The GOP didn’t just lose the election, they lost their compass. They can’t find their way to the middle, the golden mean where the majority of votes will always be found.
From “Grand Old Planet,” Paul Krugman, NYT:
“What was [Sen. Marco] Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.
“The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts.
“But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold.
“What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published ‘The Republican Brain,’ which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs. Today’s Republicans cocoon themselves in an alternate reality defined by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and only on rare occasions — like on election night — encounter any hint that what they believe might not be true.
“And, no, it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.” Emphasis added.
After the election, Charles Krauthammer said the GOP’s problem was a lack of “delicacy” in their communications. But it’s really an abundance of delusion in their thinking.
It’s interesting that on anything related to science (climate change, whether people are born gay, whether a fertilized egg is a person), the GOP insists on imposing fundamentalist Christian views on everyone.
But when it comes to economic policy, they have turned to an atheist — Ayn Rand — who preached unregulated capitalism, an unfettered free market that is as extreme to many of us as the GOP’s theocratic policies.
That’s why I don’t understand today’s GOP bravado that Mitt was a lousy candidate, but Paul Ryan will do just great in 2016. He’s with Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock on abortion, and with Rand on economics. He’s the personification of what lost last night.
Karl Rove says that this country is still center right. Even if that’s the case, his party is not center right, it is now far, far right. As the GOP has moved more to the right, the Dems have not moved equally left, so they are now the more centrist — and saner-seeming — party.
I would say this is a centrist country, that tilts left or right depending on the issue and how far each party is from the center. If politics in America is played between the 20-yard lines, the GOP is out in the parking lot, with very few young or female or minority folks at its sad little tailgate party.
NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has just endorsed President Obama because of — duh! — climate change.
From “Will Climate Get Some Respect Now?,” Nicholas Kristof, NYT:
“I was schooled in the far-reaching changes underway several years ago by Eskimos in Alaska, who told me of their amazement at seeing changes in their Arctic village — from melting permafrost to robins (for which their Inupiat language has no word), and even a (shivering) porcupine. If we can’t see that something extraordinary is going on in the world around us, we’re in trouble.”
Back in June, Mitt “I’m Also Unemployed” Romney said that we should reduce carbon emissions because of climate change. On Wednesday, at a New Hampshire town hall, Romney said that if he becomes president, he will not seek to limit such emissions.
Mitt has obviously been studying new data. No, not data on climate change. Rick Perry’s poll numbers.
Asked about Rick Perry’s views on evolution and climate change, Jon Huntsman told ABC’s Jake Tapper, “I think there’s a serious problem.” But Huntsman went on to show his own serious problem when he said, “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem.” Um, Jon, that minute happened a long time ago. Our party already proudly is, and has been for awhile now, the anti-science party. Rick Perry represents the normal, accepted, conventional wing of the party, you are the disbelieved, loony, and scorned fringe.
The question isn’t when or if the Republican Party will become the anti-science party, it’s when or if it will ever return to being a science party. Probably not in Huntsman’s political lifetime.
Embattled Farmers 