Year 2, Month 6, Day 23: The Last Trump — A Competitive Sport?

June 9: Mitt Romney’s tactical waffling on climate change has lots of Republicans up in arms. The idiot wing of the GOP (which is almost the entire party by now) is terribly upset. Mitt is going to keep plugging away at this; he’ll alienate the teabaggers, but I think he’s hoping to attract disaffected Independent environmentalist free-market libertarians, both of whom are certainly watching his campaign with interest at this point.

The New York Daily News mentions Romney as a counterpoint to Rick “Google” Santorum:

“I believe the Earth gets warmer, and I also believe the Earth gets cooler,” Santorum said. “And I think history points out that it does that. The idea that man, through the production of carbon dioxide – which is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas – is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd .”

He then said the issue was an “opportunity for the left” to take more government control.

“It’s been on a warming trend so they said, ‘Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer.’ It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life.”

The issue of climate change has been heating up the 2012 GOP race.

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney made headlines earlier this month when he broke from far-right orthodoxy and said he believes humans are partially responsible for climate change.

I had a sudden realization about these assholes, and incorporated it into this letter, which went out on June 9:

There is hardly anything that can bring down the wrath of modern Republicans than acknowledging fact-based, testable scientific reality. Enter Mitt Romney, who wants to bring the climate change debate to the table in the upcoming primary season. While Mitt doesn’t actually think we should do anything about the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced, his willingness to entertain the notion that carefully executed scientific research might have something to tell us is in itself a notion utterly repellent to Tea-party Republicans. The GOP’s anti-intellectual core is also overwhelmingly likely to believe in the Biblical Armageddon, suggesting that their rejection of climate science may be nothing more than eschatological jealousy; if civilization is going to end, they want to be certain their team gets the credit. Those of us who would like the human race to endure and thrive for eons to come, however, are watching with appalled fascination.