Year 3, Month 5, Day 10: All I Gotta Do Is…Act Naturally

Sigh. Another day, another moderate conservative who just can’t understand why his party is so darned unreasonable nowadays. The Iowa City Press-Citizen hosts the remarks of Mr. Bill Ferrel, who haz a sad:

As a conservative Republican who very much understands the need to reduce and control our spending, it may seem strange that I understand and accept that climate change is impacting my home, state and country.

It is beyond comprehension that my party would so adamantly avoid dealing with the fact that we now are facing historical events on such a regular basis that it is impacting our state and national budgets in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Why do we continue to miss the chance to address proactively the adverse impacts of our past and current actions? Why is it that we have not connected the dots between climate change and real life events that have occurred in our own backyards? Why do we find it acceptable to have massive damage to our university, and yet sit by and be satisfied with the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being spent locally to repair the damage?

Another day, another chance to educate the increasingly rare moderate Republican on why his party is full of idiots. Sent May 1:

Bill Ferrel can’t understand why his party “would so adamantly avoid dealing with the fact” of global climate change. He’s not alone in finding the antics of the current Republican party incomprehensible, but one wonders why it’s taken him so long. While the GOP’s fraught relationship with inconvenient expertise dates back to the Truman administration, when “old China hands” were expelled from the State Department by Joe McCarthy’s henchmen on charges of communist sympathies, the party of Lincoln really left its moorings with the administration of Ronald Reagan, whose anecdotal governance left facts gasping for breath in choking clouds of fairy dust.

Mr. Ferrel wants his fellow conservatives to “ask the questions and seek reasonable solutions.” But their decades of anti-intellectual posturing and ideological inflexibility have made Republicans both incurious and unreasonable — and created an overheated political environment with likely consequences almost as damaging as the burgeoning greenhouse effect.

Warren Senders