Politics

The British newspaper The Observer yesterday published a story entitled “Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us.” It’s the sort of sensationalism you’d expect from the title, full of conspiracies and secret reports and the end of the world by 2020. Unfortunately, their story seems to be getting more coverage than the more complete story that came out in Fortune Magazine after the Pentagon supplied them with a copy of the unclassified “secret report” that The Observer gushes about.

At least in the US, the Global Climate change debate is too often framed by Chicken Littles like The Observer and ostriches like our own president. The reality is that there is a growing consensus among scientists that global warming is real, is largely attributable to human activities, and will continue over the next century. However, there are also a lot of unknowns, and the “Abrupt Climate Change” scenario described in the cited report is one that has been highlighted in recent years by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

We don’t know how likely an abrupt climate change is, but the Pentagon report describes its own worst-case scenario as unlikely. Chicken Littles can come out of their fallout shelters and wipe off the 10,000 SPF sunscreen. However, our nation’s leaders need to stop sticking their heads in the sand about these potential dangers. A footlocker-sized nuke going off in New York is unlikely, but it’s a big concern in Washington and rightly so. A repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic in the next few years is also unlikely, but boy am I glad the CDC is on the case. Homeland security is all about evaluating threats and doing what’s necessary to limit our risk. That’s a lesson every large company knows, and a lesson the Pentagon has always taken to heart. Now if we could just get our president to wise up.

References

• Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us (Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, The Observer, 22 February 2004)
• Climate Collapse: The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare (David Stipp, Fortune, 26 January 2004)
• An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security (Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, October 2003)
  [I created the PDF from the DOC file posted at StopEsso, props to Tim Blair for the link]
• Climate Change Alert (Patrick Doherty, ThomasPain.com, 2 February 2004)
• Weather Warning (Ben Geoghegan, BBC News, 16 February 2004)
• The Bush Record — Global Warming (Environment2004, October 2003)
• The Third Assessment Report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Summary for Policy Makers(IPCC, January 2001)
• Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (National Research Council, 2002)
• Abrupt Climate Change (Ocean and Climate Change Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
• Global Chilling (Paul Epstein, New York Times, 28 January 2004)

There’s been lots of talk about Howard Dean’s use of the Internet, but honestly his campaign is just now entering the phase that interests me the most. As expected, Dean has stopped actively campaigning, though he still encourages supporters to vote for him and send delegates to the convention to help set the party’s platform. More importantly, he hopes to turn his loose-knit community of supporters into a grassroots movement:

[W]e will convert Dean for America into a new grassroots organization, and I hope you stay involved. We are determined to keep this entire organization vibrant. There are a lot of ways to make change. We are leaving one track, but we are going on another track that will take back America for ordinary people again.

MoveOn.org started five years ago as an online petition against President Clinton’s impeachment and now has over two million members. Dean already boasts over a quarter of that number (no doubt with significant overlap), but Deaniacs are even more self-empowered and decentralized than MoveOn members. That makes it a harder ship to steer, and Dean now needs to shift from head of a campaign to first motivating voice in a community of equals. If he can manage that (starting, perhaps, by rejoining with his old campaign manager Joe Trippi) then the movement might yet demonstrate the Internet-age decentralized politics that we breathless techno-pundits continue to predict.

From the SF Chronicle:

And no question became so clear, so obvious, as the one being asked by same-sex-marriage advocates around the world: What, really, is so wrong about this? What is the horrible threat about two adults who love each other so intensely, so purely, that they’re willing to commit to a lifetime of being together and sleeping together and arguing over who controls the remote? And what government body dares to claim a right to legislate against it?

…

In short, to the neocon Right, a nation that allows gays to marry is a nation with no boundaries and no condoms and where all sorts of illicit disgusting behaviors will soon be legal and be forced upon them, a horrific tribal wasteland full of leeches and flying bugs and scary sex acts they only read about in chat rooms and their beloved “Left Behind” series of cute apocalypse-porn books.

You know, just like how giving blacks the right to own their own land meant we had to give the same rights to house plants and power tools, or how granting women the right to vote meant it was a slippery slope until we gave suffrage to feral cats and sea slugs and rusty hubcaps.

Just as there are two kinds of marriage, religious and civil, there seem to be two kinds of fears out there. The societal fear is of moral decay — if we teach our children that homosexuality is OK then they’ll think rape, torture and masturbation is OK too. Leaving aside the lack of evidence for any such link, this kind of moral debate belongs in our churches and social centers, not our courts and congress. Then there’s the legal slippery slope fear — if the courts protect gay marriage then they might protect things like polygamy. I’m no constitutional lawyer, but that one strikes me as a poor reading what’s happening. The state cases that have been coming forward have not been ruling that homosexuality is OK, nor that homosexuals are a protected class. What they have been ruling is that if I, as a man, have the government-granted right to marry Jane in a civil marriage then so does Susan. That’s what equal protection means. This argument doesn’t apply to polygamy: I don’t have the right to marry two people, and neither does Susan. Ditto for bestiality and anything else that keeps you awake at night.

As for the SF Gate article, I have to admit I’m pretty proud to be living within the Greater San Francisco Liberal Bubble myself right now…

Docbug Exclusive — Noted military historian and strategist Ann “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” Coulter will be following up on the success of her analysis of Silver Star recipient and triple-amputee Max Cleland with biographies of other war heros, unnamed sources revealed¹.

Coulter, who last week presented her expert testimony that the decorated Vietnam veteran deserved no respect for his service because he lost his limbs “in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends,” will soon reveal her insights on other honored veterans, including The Cowardliness of Douglas MacArthur, Congressional Medal of Honor Winners: Traitors in Our Midst, and John Wayne: Pansy.

¹ Hey, if Drudge can use them, why can’t I?

From a friend of mine living in Massachusetts:

I have gotten yet MORE calls today from out-of-state relatives who are members of conservative groups (seems to be mostly evangelical Christian groups) urging me to call and voice support for the constitutional ban on gay marriage later today/tomorrow.

ALL of them told me they had already called MA state house members to urge them to vote for the ban — before they called me!

BUT THE KICKER – at least one (and I suspect from context of our conversation, another as well) of my benighted relatives admitted that they had disengenously represented themselves as MASS RESIDENTS!

ARRRRRRG!!!!!

The subtitle makes it sound like left-wing conspiracy theory, but the author is Pulitzer-winning NYTimes journalist David Cay Johnston. Looks to be an interesting read:

Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else

(see also this interview with the author)

No, I’m not talking about the presidential election…

Last week the California State Assembly discussed a new law (AB 1424) that would prohibit the state from putting a child in foster care solely for refusing to administer medication for a psychiatric disorder, or for refusing to allow the child to be tested for a psychiatric condition. An analysis of the bill can be found here.

According to a press release by the bill’s author, Assemblyman Dennis Mountjoy, the bill would protect children from “forced medication with dangerous psychiatric drugs.” He quotes Dr. Fred Baughman, a “pediatric neurologist,” as claiming mental disorders don’t exist, and quotes Cassandra Auerbach of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights as warning that psychiatrists are on the payroll of big drug companies and are covering up suicide statistics and other dangers of these drugs. The release doesn’t quite come out and say that psychiatrists are stealing your babies and stewing them for dinner, but it comes close.

I doubt this bill will ever make it out of committee, and that’s probably a good thing. In general I give deference to the parents when it comes to raising their own children, but two things set off alarm bells for me in this bill. First, I don’t like the way it treats mental illnesses as fundamentally different than physical illnesses. If the state should intervene when a parent refuses to administer life-saving medicine to treat a virus, it should also intervene when a child is chronically suicidal or homicidal. Second, I’m extremely sceptical of the two “experts” cited in the propaganda for this bill. Dr. Baughman seems to be of the opinion that mental illnesses don’t exist because we don’t yet know the direct causal links between brain chemistry and most illnesses. Even ignoring the fact that this lack of knowledge is true of many physical illnesses as well, the idea that mental illness is not associated with brain and body chemistry is ludicrous on its face: if suicidal thoughts and other dangerous behavior were not related to chemistry then psychoactive drugs could not have the effects they have. While they are not unbiased in this debate, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) testified in a letter to Congress that Dr. Baughman “represent[s] fringe opinions” about psychiatry. As for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, this righteously-named group was founded by the Church of Scientology with a charter to attack psychiatrists and the psychiatric profession. For those who don’t know their history, Scientology is a cult that considers the field of medicine, and particularly psychiatry, as evil incarnate. I recommend Garry Armstrong’s site for a good explanation of why. I don’t whether CCHR is behind this bill or just supporting it, but their association with it in any form makes me worried.

USA Today is trying to play gotcha with Howard Dean by citing a letter that Dean wrote urging then-president Clinton to take unilateral action in Bosnia. AHA! says the press — but Dean criticized Bush about unilateralism, therefore he’s a hypocrite!

The bloggers, of course, have already jumped on it. Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds is gloating:

Hmm. Sounds a lot like the situation in Iraq under Saddam, except that with Iraq (1) the human rights abuses were worse; (2) the failures of the UN and the international community were greater; and, oh yeah, (3) there was a Republican president. I wonder which one of these factors made the difference in terms of Dean’s positions?

Meanwhile, Roger Simon seems to think that the Net has brought an end to hypocrisy.:

Normal political hypocrisy? Well, sure. But it is worse. Because this is Mr. Tell-It-Like It-Is and he isn’t. And he can’t. There’s too much information already on record. The Internet will be his great undoing. This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Wait until summer. The same is true for Clark. In a sea of a million fact-checkers, his idiot vacillations seem all the more ridiculous. If he gets nominated, it is going to be a donnybrook.

Now, I like a good witch-burning as much as the next guy — it give me a great feeling of camaraderie with my fellow pilgrims as we congratulate each other and roast marshmallows on the embers. But this isn’t Internet-age fact-checking. This is good old-fashioned political gotcha, the high-stakes version of waiting for someone to not say “Mother may I” so you can give him noogies.

If the Net really was the “greatest memory device we ever had” and if “bloggers and others will dig it out and force the media to publicize it” as Simon argues, Reynolds wouldn’t have to speculate on why Dean might think Bosnia is different from Iraq. He could instead just go to speeches posted on Dean’s website and read for himself:

Let me be clear: My position on the war has not changed.

The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show that the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at unbelievable cost. An administration prepared to work with others in true partnership might have been able, if it found no alternative to Saddam’s ouster, to then rebuild Iraq with far less cost and risk…

…The Iraq war diverted critical intelligence and military resources, undermined diplomatic support for our fight against terror, and created a new rallying cry for terrorist recruits.

And what of Dean’s position on unilateralism? Well, in a scoop that would make Drudge’s head spin, DocBug.com has obtained documentation (again on Dean’s Web site) that he’s not opposed to unilateralism per say, but that it should only be used when other options are gone:

Now, when America should be at the height of its influence, we find ourselves, too often, isolated and resented. America should never be afraid to act alone when necessary. But we must not choose unilateral action as our weapon of first resort.

Simon is correct, the Net is the best memory device we’ve ever had. But if bloggers (and worse, professional journalists) can’t even bother to check a candidate’s own website, what use is that memory?

The Net is a great well of knowledge. Unfortunately, like all wells, it also makes a great echo chamber.

References

• Dean urged Clinton to take unilateral action in Bosnia (Steve Komarow, USA Today, 14 January 2004)
• Bosnia advice haunts Dean in campaign (Charles Hurt, The Washington Times, 14 January 2003)
• Howard Dean letter to President Clinton (Howard Dean, cited by USA Today, 19 July 1995)
• Past Statements Come Back To Haunt Howard Dean Again (Glenn Reynolds, 14 January 2004)
• Dean Lays Out Foreign Policy, Calls for Global Alliance Against Terrorism (Howard Dean, 15 December 2003)
• Dean on: Preventive War (Howard Dean, DeanForAmerica.com, 11 Dec 2003) [for other candidate positions on the same question, see the next link]
• Council For A Livable World Releases Responses From Presidential Candidates On National Security Question (Council For A Livable World, 11 December 2003)
• Howard Dean (Conversation with Howard Dean, The Arizona Republic, 17 December 2003)

I very much hope that two hundred years from now, President Bush is remembered most of all as the man who started us on the path back into space…

…long after the economic ripples from early 21st century deficit spending have subsided.

…long after we survived the nuclearization of dangerous dictatorships, either because of or in spite of our leadership.

…long after the rebuilding of post-Sadam Iraq, into the thriving democracy, brutal theocracy, or boiling anarchy it eventually became.

…long after the US and its allies stopped viewing each other with arrogance, suspicion and contempt.

…long after a consensus on the causes of global warming was reached, and that understanding was used to avoid disaster.

…long after some claims that the United States had lost its guiding principles of freedom, openness and tolerance were proven unfounded, while others were heeded as the early warning they were, and our course was corrected.

Some are calling this all election-year posturing, but it’s more than that. This is a vision that humans should excel to heights never before achieved in all of history. It’s a vision that we should strive for knowledge and understanding of things larger than ourselves. And it’s a vision that the nations of the Earth should go together in this journey. This is the sort of vision that can last for centuries.

Club For Growth‘s latest anti-Dean ad really captures my image of a typical Vermonter:

Announcer off-screen: What do you think of Howard Dean’s plans to raise taxes on families by nineteen hundred dollars a year?

Husband: What do I think? Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-Reading…

Wife [continuing his sentence]: …body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sled back to my typical California log cabin and have some flapjacks with maple syrup…

(Now that I think about it, this whole ad looks straight out of The Onion’s What Do You Think? column.)