Year 2, Month 11, Day 1: Please Lie To Me!

The former governor of my state is a soulless sociopath with the intellectual depth of a life-size Ken doll. The Boston Globe for October 28:

Is Mitt Romney tweaking his position on global warming?

The former Massachusetts governor had been one of the few Republican presidential candidates to embrace the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to climate change. But in a speech in Pittsburgh on Thursday, he sounded like more of a skeptic.

“My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” Romney said in the speech, a clip of which was posted by the liberal blog Think Progress. “And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”

Romney gave a different answer in June, when he was asked whether humans contribute to climate change.

“I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course,” Romney said at a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire. “But I believe the world’s getting warmer. I can’t prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.”

I wrote a similar letter to the Globe years ago, and they published it. Maybe this one will work, too. Sent October 28:

Mitt Romney learned a valuable political lesson from his father’s experience: don’t tell the truth if you can help it.

Returning from a 1967 visit to Vietnam, George Romney remarked that his earlier support for the Vietnam War was the result of “brainwashing” by U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Vietnam, and the ensuing storm of bad publicity ran his presidential campaign into a ditch.

While the light of history shows that the elder Romney was telling the truth, that didn’t help him with the Republican electorate, then as now acutely sensitive to any flouting of its shibboleths. Romney the younger’s acknowledgment of climate change is a similar misstep; it’s gratifying that our erstwhile governor has taken his father’s experience to heart and is now walking back his heretical stance on scientific expertise.

Mitt’s finally figured it out: when it comes to wooing GOP primary voters, facts are best left unaddressed.

Warren Senders