The Sunshine Empire

Polling has proven that Sarah Palin is still very popular among the conservative base in this country despite her overall unfavorable status among the American people. This is of course not due to Mrs. Palin. Nothing is ever her fault, it’s always the media. She of course had no issue venturing into the very media that she scorns, and that has allowed her to make millions in book sales and speech fees, to write an op-ed in the Washington Post. Now as Think Progress has pointed out, Palin has flip flopped on this issue. She’s also so sure of her positions that she refused to commit to Laura Ingraham that she would debate Al Gore on the issue. But this brings to mind something unsaid in this political debate. This is not a liberal – conservative issue like health care, or spending, or abortion to a lesser extent. There are wide swaths of conservatives that are believers in the concept of climate change and global warming. On CNN this morning I watched an evangelical Christian make the point for working to prevent climate change. The fascinating thing about the political debate is how certain conservatives, like Palin and John McCain have stated their belief in climate change in the past, then slowly melded their beliefs to denial status to please the extreme base of the conservative movement. At least those like Senator James Inhofe, no matter how wrong they may be, have been consistent from the beginning. Too often now the attitude within the conservative movement has been “well, the liberals are for it, so that means we must be against it.” The supposedly liberal media has done nothing but help by framing the issue as monolithic on both sides. Meanwhile Sarah Palin will go to her Facebook page to claim that her contradiction is nothing more than the work of the media. Everything that she fails at always seems to be.