I just heard Sarah Palin saying that she doesn’t blame all human behaviour on global warming. Okay, let’s be charitable and assume she meant that the other way around. But then she said we should stop arguing about what causes global warming and just focus on how to fix it. As Rachel Maddow pointed out – if you don’t know what’s causing it, how can you know what would fix it?
Incidentally, I like Maddow more than most of the punditti, but her suggestion that we should respond to the current financial crisis with “New Deal” style legislation that helps the poor, as opposed to a bailout plan that helps the rich, makes me tear my hair out. What was the New Deal if not thoroughgoing crony capitalism that shafted the poor on a massive scale? She really needs to read Robert Higgs’ Depression, War, and Cold War and Butler Shaffer’s In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918-1938.
Huh? Even for those who regard McCain’s war record as a valuable achievement, how is it “belittling” one achievement to point out that it’s not a relevant qualification for another achievement? Would you agree to be operated on by someone whose sole qualification is that he can speak fourteen languages? Or would you accept as a translator, for your visit to the headhunters of the Amazon, someone who could boast only surgical proficiency? And if not, are you “belittling” linguistic competency (or, in the second case, medical skill)?
I remember once, during a strike in New York when the salmon wasn’t coming in, there seemed to be a glut of bagels in the Jewish bakeries. In a whimsical moment I sent a cable to my editor warning him that I was about to put a piece on the wire to be entitled, “Lox Lag Brings Bagel Boom.” He cabled right back: “your message hopelessly garbled it reads lox lag brings bagel boom.”