Quit arguing with douchebags that everyone hates, part two
Following up a bit on my previous post, let's make some more specific points.
Point number one:
Newt Gingrich is a douchebag and everyone hates him. Few figures in American politics (beyond Dick Cheney) are as discredited and unpopular as the bilious windbag Newt, whose renewed prominence as an "intellectual" on the right side of the aisle is the single best piece of evidence of irrevocable conservative decline. As Miles Grant reminded us last year:
If there's anyone who proves time may not necessarily heal all wounds, it's Newt. Nearly a decade after he resigned from the House with an approval rating of just 28 percent, a 2007 poll showed remarkable 54 percent of Americans still held an unfavorable opinion of Gingrich. Cheney was only slightly less popular, rated unfavorably by 57 percent of those polled.
It's true that he blatantly contradicted himself in his Congressional testimony last week. It's true that his "solution" to climate change is a transparently industry-beholden stew of corporate welfare. It's true that he lies like he breathes. But do progressives have to panic and hold strategy meetings every time he burps up more gas?
No. Everybody hates the guy. He's a spokesdouche you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
Point number two:
Congressional Republicans are douchebags and everyone hates them. You might think from their program of uncompromising, unreasoning obstruction that they have some secret master plan to regain seats in Congress (which, as you might have noticed, they keep losing), but as Matt Yglesias points out, it's not so. Even National Republican Senatorial Committee chair John Cornyn (TX) admits that it's all but a fait accompli that Democrats will reach 60 votes in the Senate in 2010.
That's because everyone likes Obama, and everyone hates Republicans. As Chris Bowers has documented in an ongoing series, they are less popular among the American public than Obama, Congressional Dems, marijuana legalization, Venezuela, China, and probably this new pig flu, though no one's polled that yet. They screwed up the country, they don't have credible solutions to any of its problems, and the only people who listen to their increasingly loopy rhetoric are part of the 30% remnant.
Point number three:
Marc Morano is a douchebag and most people don't even give enough of a crap about him to hate him. Once James Inhofe's Senate butt boy, which gave him a modicum of relevance and credibility, Morano is now the proprietor of an obscure Drudge-wannabe climate denial site. He is useful to the 30% and their Congressional representatives; he supplies their climate-related talking points. But those talking points are crazy, and everyone hates the people repeating them.
Morano scammed his way into an NYT profile, but only as a flat-earth clown. The only way he gets any ongoing press coverage outside the 30% is by baiting progressive bloggers and journalists, jumping into their comment sections and sending them email every time they so much as mention his name.
But the public at large, outside the ideological tribe? They don't know. They don't care. And if they knew, they'd hate him too, like other mouth-breathers preaching conspiracy theories.
The same can be said of the whole constellation of blogs and TV shows made by and for the 30%. There is simply no need to devote much attention to refuting the lies that pour forth from this revanchist remnant. Concern over climate change and support for action to address it is the mainstream position in America. Those writing and speaking in the mainstream ought to address themselves to the mainstream, helping to address its questions and concerns about the transition away from fossil fuels. (And there are plenty.)
Some time in the next hour, somebody will say something stupid on cable TV. Somebody will write an idiot op-ed. Somebody will be wrong on the internet. Let. It. Go.
Focus on wavering Dems and their constituents and their constituents' jobs. Focus on how energy/climate legislation will make the country cleaner, healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous. The Newts can't stop anybody, they can only distract and sap energy from those doing the work.
They are not Boogie men. They are douchebags, and everyone hates them.
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Journalists report information, and I feel they've bent over backwards appeasing creationists and climate change deniers. Some fraction of U.S. citizens believes the Sun orbits the Earth, but journalists wisely don't give that ignorance a platform. It is time for the same treatment for the denial of human-dominated climate change so we can get on with debating effective solutions. Until journalists no longer appease this politically based denial, those who understand the situation must overwhelm the denials with factual evidence. Trying to do my part, I've posted a graph of our energy use from various sources over the last two centuries (from the US DOE's 2006 Annual Energy Review) online at:
http://www
I've also posted information showing the reality of global warming, and some consequences measured in other organisms:
http://www
Plots showing increasing sea levels, too:
http://www
If you simply want to deny reality, well, our country proudly gives you that right. The rest of us just have to work that much harder, and we will, to get the things done that need to be done.
Will Wilson
Who could argue with environmentalists? After all, thanks to them, MTBE poisoned our water in CA, the nuclear industry was halted to open the way for more coal burning power plants and forests were prohibited to be properly managed resulting in more intense and massive forest fires.
We shouldn't question anything they say. There is no room for debates. Just let them spend any of our money they ask for and let them implement any solution they conjure up.
I love him.
But somehow we're supposed to buy into a failed presidential contender who decided to purchase a wagon and become a snake oil salesman? Last winter amidst the coldest weather in centuries, one could hear Mr. Gores' maniacal laughter wafting in the snowstorms
Really? Coldest winter in centuries? http://www
Stop listening to Limbaugh and Hannity.
The carbon dioxide will catalyze a reverse sublimation of the water vapor greenhouse gas causing the glaciers to grow and move on New York freezing up what is left of the credit.
The angle of the dangle should always be equal to the heat of the meat.
Yes, you're right of course. The chicken little folks running around thinking that global warming is anything more than Gore's smoke and mirrors dog & pony show need to be reminded that scientists are beginning to think (again) that we are entering another Ice Age.
"...scient
You are not credible on your own because it's just us chickens here. How 'bout some quotations with sources?
Check out Dr. Noah Robinson
The sad truth is the climate change debate, renamed from ‘global warming’ after the globe stopped warming in 1998, has nothing to do with science. There is little correlation between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide and powerful correlation between temperature and solar activity.
Solar activity passed its peak in the early 1990s and is expected to decline quite sharply to a minimum around 2030. The cooling that has already begun probably will not be like the cooling of the 1940s-1970s that inspired the global cooling scare stories about an impending new ice age. It is more likely to lead to a replay of the Little Ice Age, with its attendant repeated crop failures and famines.
The Little Ice Age forced families facing starvation to choose which of their children to abandon in the forest in order to stretch food far enough for the rest of the family to survive until spring, a la the tale of Hansel and Gretel. The relentlessly bad weather confined weakened, malnourished people indoors in close quarters, setting up perfect conditions for the Black Plague to ravage Europe from 1347-1351.
I sympathize. It's a given that you can never convince a Republican of anything. Not that the sun rises in the east, not that the sky is blue, not that torture is evil.
The real reason that some of us have to keep refuting the ignorant, lying nonsense they spout, though, is that there is a constant influx of young people into the political arena who may never have heard the refutation. Without it, they, like millions of people before them, might believe that the ignorant. lying nonsense is true. It seems to me this is what happened prior to the 2000 election. It was the large contingent of voters who had simply tuned the arguments out who made it possible for Bush to make the election close enough to steal. Granted, the endless recapitulation of the old arguments is tiresome and boring after awhile. Unfortunately, I really think it is necessary.
I couldn't agree more. I have stopped trying to engage climate denialist for the same reason I have stopped engaging creationists. It's pointless. Their strategy is simply never stop using an argument no matter how many times it has been refuted.
I'm only interested now in the question what is to be done. I don't wish to waste my time with that bunch and increasingly I don't need to.
I am reminded of how intentionally obtuse notions achieved intellectual heavyweight status for the likes of Buckley. It was his contemporaries on the opposite side of the so-called political spectrum - whose failure to challenge his puerile positioning for what they were - that have led to politics being completely devoid of reason. That and, of course, politicians being bought and paid for. How else could one explain why, when someone proposes something deliberately idiotic, his counterpart fails to call him on it, but instead declares something akin to: "Well, done, my good man, but I respectfully disagree."
At least Buckley was fairly wealthy and had something to gain from his puerile positioning, but I'll never understand those who eat their own simply because they think its cool to be associated with such simple-mindedness.
Tell it like it is!
I like it!
Great advice and I only wish the Cable TV segment producers could be forced to read this post. they are the ones calling these clowns in, to fill the time between commercial breaks.
I suggest a basic rule: No more than one on-camera appearance each quarter. That would open up the time slots to tons of more people, some of whom might even be interestin
(Not holding my breath)
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