Science Guide

Joe Conason of Salon's piece on Sarah Palin is so representative of contemporary "progressive" thought that it pays revisiting.  He asks -- in that sanctimonious way so beloved by his tribe:

Why should we pretend not to notice when Gov. Palin's ideas make no sense? Having said last week that "it doesn't matter" whether human activity is the cause of climate change, she said in debate that she "doesn't want to argue" about the causes. It doesn't occur to her that we have to know the causes in order to address the problem. (She was very fortunate that moderator Gwen Ifill didn't ask her whether she truly believes that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited this planet simultaneously only 6,000 years ago.)

Since Mr. Conason and his readers cannot make the inference themselves, we who support the GOP must be careful from this day forth to fill in the passages of reasoning over which they cannot ever seem to leap:  that "global warming" and its purported causes is irrelevant.  We used to have a whole lot of people who cared about the thing you call "the environment" (we used to call it "nature") and we used to call these people "conservationists."  Madonna and Al Gore insisted that the name be changed because it sounded too much like "conservative," and therefore might have brought forth bipartisanship on a topic that concerns everyone.  Horror, people agreeing.  Cannot have that.  Plus Madonna thought it might hinder her marketing if people were encouraged to care about serious things.

So, friends, in order to seem to monopolize the issue it was renamed "environmentalism" and became the trademarked and copyrighted property of the Left and nature be damned.

However, as Sarah Palin has so gently tried to point out to Katie Couric (a discerning intellectual of leftwing politics), people can do a lot to counter effects of pollution and habitat destruction.  We can still care about clean water, clean air, wild animals, and wilderness with or without a theory of global warming.  The inference that if global warming is natural that various helpful actions are still possible (besides wringing  one's hands in despair) is not an idea that Left-wing thinkers can "get" unassisted. 

We have to tell them that  Sarah Palin actually knows something about "nature."  She can still see it from her front porch.

You know, it's too bad that Gwen Ifill didn't ask Sarah Palin the question about whether she believed that humans and dinosaurs existed during the same geologic period.  Palin could have simply said, "No."  And that would be the denouement of Conason's little fantasy.

PHOTO CREDIT CLICK