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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

A Dose of Their Own Wingnut Medicine

Birther billboardYeah, yeah, yeah.Two birther posts in two days. It may seem a little like overkill, but I've got to admit I find this all fascinating. What's especially entertaining about it is watching the conservative establishment realize what kind of nuts they have in their base. The bullheaded, willful ignorance of your average wingnut has always been something the right has counted on. From family planning to gays to economics to evolution to global warming, the right has relied on the base to be positively unbudgeable. They won't give an inch, no matter how absurd and ridiculous their position is proven to be. They're like a rock, both in their unchanging nature and their intellect. The Republican party has relied on persistently gullible fools for years and now it's finally caught up with them.

We can see this in establishment conservatives begging the nuts to knock it off. This whole Obama birth certificate thing is killing them.

Hey guys, welcome to my world. You've let these nuts run loose, making asses of themselves on just about every issue there is, while applauding them for their ignorance. Yeah, they sure do stick to their guns, don't they? As long as they were out there repeating your lies, you were cool with it. But now that they've come up with lies of their own... well, that's a different story, isn't it? And you're finally learning just how relentlessly annoying these intellectual lightweights of yours can be.





First to give a shot at straightening out the nuts is the editorial board of the Reaganaut flagship, National Review:

Pres. Barack Obama has a birthday coming up, a week from Tuesday. We hope he takes the day off -- or even the whole week, the briefest of respites from his busy schedule of truncating our liberties while exhausting both the public coffers and our patience. The president’s birthday comes to mind because we recently spent some time looking at a photograph of his birth certificate, being held by Joe Miller of Factcheck.org, who took the time to examine it. President Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m, in Honolulu County, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. The serial number on his birth certificate is 010641. Baby Barack’s birth was not heralded, as some of his partisans have suggested, by a star in the east, but it was heralded by the Honolulu Star, as well as the Honolulu Advertiser, each of which published birth announcements for young Mr. Obama.


Wow. So you just lay out the facts, huh? Good luck with that. It's not like no one's ever tried that with evolution or global warming or homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice." Trust me, the facts don't matter and this isn't going to work. We've collected one hundred years worth of evidence for evolution, yet there's a big museum outside Cincinnati with displays of dinosaurs with saddles on them. We're watching sea ice recede and you've got people convinced the earth is actually cooling. It's a little late for the right to start expecting their base to give a damn about the facts. And it's a little surprising that you think the facts will make any difference at all. We already tried that, geniuses.

Next up is Bill Pascoe for CQ Politics:

As one of the GOP operatives whose job it was to defeat Barack Obama in a campaign for federal office (there have only been three GOP campaigns run against him, and I've been involved with two of them), I can attest to the fact that nowhere in our opposition research did we find any reason to believe that the man was not a natural born citizen of the United States.


He points out that one of the lead birthers, Alan Keyes, once ran against Obama in an Illinois Senate race and never brought all this birth certificate crap up. And, unlike NR's editorial board, Pascoe's not above begging. "Seriously," he says. "Is this anything but a gift to the Democrats?"

"Reasonable and responsible conservatives... are stuck," Pascoe writes. "We are being lumped in with irresponsible and unreasonable conspiracy theorists."

Now why would people do that? It's so unfair. Just because you guys have jumped on every anti-fact bandwagon since Goldwater lost -- from denying tobacco was bad for you to denying that there was a problem with having a hole in the ozone layer -- people are lumping you in with the kooks who refuse to concede the facts on this issue. How terribly, terribly unjust.

After training these people to charge ahead, facts be damned, for decade after decade, the right is finally forced to deal with the monster they've created -- a stupid, lumbering, stubborn idiot of a problem that's finally come back to bite them in the ass. Throw all the facts you want at them, throw any argument you like. Nothing will work, because decades of intellectual inbreeding have made them immune to logic and reason. I wish the right luck, because if they figure out how to deal with them, we'll see how it's done.

But I'm not holding my breath. So far, they're trying everything we've tried for years -- facts, logic, the written record of history, the weight of the evidence, etc. That's not going to work.

So there you go Dr. Frankenstein. It's your turn to fight with your monster. Don't expect me to feel sorry for you.

-Wisco


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17 comments:

Steven Marty Grant said...

Time to update your talking points; ozone depletion (according to NASA) is primarily due to volcanic out gassing of ammonia. When you make statements of absolute knowledge regarding extremely complex geological occurrences like “global warming” it makes you sound as ignorant as the right wing nuts you love to roast. When current media driven opinion is called fact we have a disconnect somewhere. Human pollution has been a problem for about one hundred fifty years while the global average temperature has fluctuated as much as 10 degrees for the last 500 thousand years.

Before you begin your ad homonym attacks I will state that I am in favor of drastically improved emission standards and clean energy solutions. We have a responsibility as citizens of the world to leave this place better than we found it. What I am against is halfassed science being touted as “proven” fact.

Harold Fowler said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

JESUS is not happy with this blog. Soon He will smite thee.

THIS IS AMERICA!!!! THE LAND OF FREEDOM OF ALL. GO BACK TO CANADA OT WHEREVER

M said...

Observing Republicans in the internet age is a lot like watching aging porn stars in HD.

All the flaws are visible and the fantasies shattered.

Wisco said: "from denying tobacco was bad for you to denying that there was a problem with having a hole in the ozone layer."

SMG said: "Time to update your talking points; ozone depletion (according to NASA) is primarily due to volcanic out gassing of ammonia. When you make statements of absolute knowledge regarding extremely complex geological occurrences like “global warming” it makes you sound as ignorant as the right wing nuts you love to roast."

I say: Someone should read and think before they post insulting attacks.

There's no connection with global warming in that line.

The post doesn't succeed or fail on one little line, and certainly not one little line that was ignorantly taken out context.

You should feel dumb. Better luck next time.

IntereoVivo said...

@M

Its funny, but I got the same impression as SMG when I read the blog. You will also note that he doesn't reference that "one little line that was ignorantly taken out context."

If you think someone is being a fool, its better just to let them and get on with life then open your mouth and join them.

:D Yes, I know that makes me a fool.

IntereoVivo said...

I just realized that my previous post might lead people to the impression that I disagree with the blog above.

Not so, in fact, I think it is disturbingly true.

My party makes me really depressed sometimes.

Steven Marty Grant said...

I know this is a waste of time because "M" seems to need complete agreement with everything Wisco has written but here goes:

1) "From family planning to gays to economics to evolution to global warming, the right has relied on the base to be positively unbudgeable."



2) "So you just lay out the facts, huh? Good luck with that. It's not like no one's ever tried that with evolution or global warming or homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice." Trust me, the facts don't matter and this isn't going to work. We've collected one hundred years worth of evidence for evolution, yet there's a big museum outside Cincinnati with displays of dinosaurs with saddles on them. We're watching sea ice recede and you've got people convinced the earth is actually cooling."

3)"from denying tobacco was bad for you to denying that there was a problem with having a hole in the ozone layer -- people are lumping you in with the kooks who refuse to concede the facts on this issue. How terribly, terribly unjust."

Several references but again my only point was the choice of the word "Fact". I agree with this blog more than I disagree but if a point strikes me as off I will present an argument.

Wisco said...

-Time to update your talking points; ozone depletion (according to NASA) is primarily due to volcanic out gassing of ammonia.-

This begs the question; so what? The ozone layer is naturally renewing. The question isn't what causes most of the depletion, but what causes the total to reach the tipping point where it's being destroyed faster than it's being renewed. Since we can't do anything about volcanoes -- and since volcanoes have been around since day one, we look at what might be depleting the ozone in addition to the usual suspects. We came to the conclusion that it was CFCs and -- lo and behold -- we were right. The ozone hole is beginning to close again, not long after we signed the Montreal Protocols limiting CFCs.

Seriously, you can't argue with results.

Steven Marty Grant said...

Yes and by that logic everything bad that has happened to the economy since January should be blamed on BA.

Wisco said...

-Yes and by that logic everything bad that has happened to the economy since January should be blamed on BA. -

Only if you deliberately misunderstand it.

Steven Marty Grant said...

Post hoc ergo propter hoc:

1) The ozone hole closed up after CFC's were banned therefore CFC's were the cause of the hole.

2) The economy got worse after Barack Obama was elected. Barack Obama is a Democrat. Therefore Democrats are bad for the economy.

Both arguments work if you ignore the facts.

Wisco said...

You're abusing logic by misrepresenting the arguments. It was predicted that limiting CFCs would repair the damage and those predictions were very specific. CFCs were clearly the cause of the excess damage -- just as predicted.

Meanwhile, Obama inherited an economy in decline from Bush and, while many people -- including Obama -- predicted that the economy would get worse, no one argues that the economy crashed because of Obama.

The ozone layer was damaged to the point of creating a hole by CFCs, but the economy wasn't damaged to the point that it crashed because of Obama.

Your apples and oranges comparison suffers from deconstruction.

Steven Marty Grant said...

That is exactly my point. The ozone hole was shown to have been caused excess ammonia in the atmosphere from volcanic out gassing. CFC’s can destroy ozone if they come in contact with ozone but they did not cause the depletion over the South Pole.

Wisco said...

I don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's just plain wrong. Here's NASA -- which you cited -- on the subject:

-Between 1986 and 1987, several papers suggested possible mechanisms for the ozone hole, including chemical, dynamical (meteorological), and solar cycle influences. Among the key papers explaining the atmospheric chemistry of CFCs and ozone depletion was one by Susan Solomon and several colleagues. The paper also emphasized the need for polar stratospheric clouds to explain the reaction chemistry. Also in 1986, Michael B. McElroy and colleagues described a role for bromine in ozone-depleting reactions. Paul Crutzen and Frank Arnold proposed that the polar stratospheric clouds could be made of nitric acid trihydrate, which would explain the clouds’ presence at an altitude and temperature that should not have been cold enough for the tiny amount of pure water vapor present in the stratosphere to condense.

Observational evidence of the role of chlorine in ozone loss continued to mount during that same period. For example, the National Ozone Expedition (NOZE) measured elevated levels of the chemical chlorine dioxide (OClO) during the springtime ozone hole from McMurdo Research Station. Then in 1987, the Antarctic Airborne Ozone Expedition flew the ER-2 and DC-8 research aircraft from Punta Arenas, Chile, into the Antarctic Vortex.

The aircraft observations produced the "smoking gun" linking CFC-derived chlorine to the ozone hole. The flight data showed a negative correlation between chlorine monoxide (ClO) and ozone: the higher the concentration of ClO, the lower the concentration of ozone. In 1988, the husband and wife team Mario and Luisa Molina described the chemical reactions through which ClO catalyzes the extremely rapid destruction of ozone.
-

Steven Marty Grant said...

You win, hairspray killed the ozone layer.

Anonymous said...

The following is copied from http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/Ozone/depletion.html

At this time human activity accounts for 75-85% of the chlorine in the stratosphere. The remaning 15-20% comes almost totally from Methyl chloride, most of that from natural sources and burning of biomass. Large, explosive volcanoes contribute an additional couple of percent.

Anonymous said...
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