Year 3, Month 1, Day 28: Mitt And Newt’s Excellent Vacation

The Aiken Standard (PA) runs the same AP article on the environmental disaster presented by America’s Republican Party. Here’s another excerpt:

Michelle Pautz, a political science professor at the University of Dayton who focuses on environmental policy, said the current slate of Republicans may not be giving much reason to applaud their environmental stances, but it may not matter much overall with the economy taking center stage.

“The bottom line is both with the GOP primary and looking to Obama and the general election, the green vote is a non-issue,” Pautz said. “There are too many other issues crowding out the environmental ones.”

But Tony Cani, the national political director for the Sierra Club, said taking what he calls “extreme” views on the environment won’t play well come Nov. 6.

“They’re going to be hurt with young voters, women, families, Latino voters,” Cani said.

Jim DiPeso, of Republicans for Environmental Protection, said he hopes to see a shift as Election Day draws closer, but that the state of politics right now has made ecological issues untouchable.

“A lot of the more pragmatic mainstream Republicans just are trying to steer clear of the issue because it’s become so politically fraught,” he said.

I wrote this after reading a liveblog on DK of the Monday night debate. It was fun. Sent January 23:

In a year where Newt Gingrich poses as an exemplar of political integrity and Mitt Romney has more positions than a porn star, it’s irrelevant whether the candidates “believe” in the science of climate change. Both have previously stated that they think global warming is happening — only to backtrack rapidly once it became clear that their party’s multi-decade anti-intellectual strategy has created a constituency for whom any sort of science is anathema. It is to them that candidates must appeal; the question is not whether Gingrich, Romney or any other political aspirant accepts the reality of an overwhelming scientific consensus on atmospheric CO2 and the greenhouse effect, but what GOP primary voters are willing to accept from their anointed representatives.

The Republican front-runners’ will profess their adherence to whatever their base believes, whether they themselves believe it or not. That’s bad for democracy — and bad for the planet.

Warren Senders