Year 2, Month 9, Day 3: If wishes were horses, there would be lots of wish-poop on the street.

The August 30 Kansas City Star reprints a column from the LA Times by Eugene Linden, called “Betting The Farm Against Climate Change.” Good stuff:

Leon Trotsky is reputed to have quipped, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Substitute the words “climate change” for “war” and the quote is perfectly suited for the governors of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, all of whom have ridiculed or dismissed the threat of climate change even as their states suffer record-breaking heat and drought.

In his book, “Fed Up!” Texas governor and presidential aspirant Rick Perry derided global warming as a “phony mess,” a sentiment he has expanded on in recent campaign appearances. Susana Martinez, the governor of New Mexico, has gone on record as doubting that humans influence climate, and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma dismissed research on climate change as a waste of time. Her solution to the extraordinary drought: pray for rain (an approach also endorsed by Perry).

Heh heh heh. Sent August 30:

The exigencies of Republican electoral politics have been biased toward the surreal for decades, but the current season is by far the most bizarre. Even at their most anti-intellectual moments, GOP aspirants have always offered some form of glib lip-service to American scientific achievement and technological progress. No more; the new standard is a vehement rejection of anything that requires logic, analysis or the interpretation of facts. The irrelevance of actual data to conservative philosophies of governance is unsettling; traditionally, politics is called “the art of the possible” — surely a reality-based way of putting it.

While these politicians don’t believe humans are influencing the earth’s climate, they’re absolutely certain that the inconvenient reality of catastrophic global warming will vanish if we deny it strongly enough. If refusing to accept facts actually makes them go away, perhaps we should all deny the existence of Republican politicians.

Yeah. That oughta work.

Warren Senders