The Sunshine Empire

A group of hardened conservatives and the conservative media have been gleefully declaring the issue of climate changed to be totally debunked. Despite the fact that wide swaths of Republicans are believers in the existence of planetary warming caused by industrial man, many look at the issue of climate change as a liberal sacred cow that must be destroyed. While I am not going to enter into a debate about climate change in this space today, I do find the media firestorm over the issue and conservatives being convinced that the argument is over to be particularly fascinating. “Climate-gate” as the wingnuts are calling it came from what amounts to a phrase and a word taken from thousands of emails from one particular climate study facility. That’s all it took for them to be convinced that the whole of science behind the belief in global warming is all invalid.

Whereas a word and a phrase were all it took to convince climate change deniers, the same people seem to have to this day a much higher threshold when it comes to the deceptions surrounding the American push to invade Iraq in 2003. I have spoken to more than one person whom I know that believe global warming has been thoroughly debunked, but still believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion and had a connection to Osama bin Laden. The same people who now declare climate change activists as intentional duplicitous frauds, will continue to insist that the entire world believed Saddam Hussein had WMD. If you remember the coalition of the willing you know that there were plenty who were unwilling, and not unanimous in some belief in a two bit dictator sitting on a mountain of mustard gas. When presented with documentation that the Germans who held the Bush Administration’s main human source of Iraqi intelligence questioned the authenticity of his claims, climate change deniers insist that despite that he had to have had the weapons because he had used them before. The suspension of disbelief continues unabated and with a straight face the continue to insist climate emails mean case closed. When presented with the verifiable fact that despite having the uranium in Africa story debunked Bush used it anyway in his State Of The Union Speech, conservatives continue to give Bush a benefit of the doubt staggeringly greater than they now allow for the climate change email story.

The unanswered question is why the difference in skepticism? Despite the mountain of evidence showing the Bush Administration was ready for war with Iraq long before 9/11 conservatives continue to insist that the Iraq was an honest mistake. With the news that 22 million emails that the Bush administration claimed were lost have now been recovered there could be more opportunity for Iraq skeptics to be one over. I’m guessing that it will take more than one email with the word trick to get them to admit they were lied to on Iraq.

Related posts:

1. TSE Chat Room: Climategate Vs. Iraq War
2. Republican Silence On TARP And Iraq Withdrawal Telling
3. The ever disappearing reasons for staying in Iraq
4. Sarah Palin’s Climate Change Contradiction Nothing More Than Liberal Media Plot
5. Turns Out Bush Really Did Violate The Law