WashPost And AP: Obama Is ‘Liberal’ Because He Agrees With Most Americans We Need More Climate Action

By Joe Romm on Jan 26, 2013 at 11:27 am

This Washington Post headline sums up so much that is wrong with the media and politics today:
I understand why fossil-fuel-funded conservatives assert that climate change is “liberal.” By why does the Associated Press and WashPost fall into that trap?

I guess it’s true, as Stephen Colbert famously said, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” See also David Frum Tweets: ‘Horrible Possibility: If The Geeks Are Right About Ohio, Might They Also Be Right About Climate?’ [Though I'll leave it to others to explain just why it is liberal to want to let women be (officially) in combat!]

These remarks in Obama’s inaugural are, apparently, what the AP and Washington Post consider liberal:

We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.

Now even Rasmussen, a firm with a well-known conservative bias, found in a poll the day before the election that 68% of American voters see global warming as a “serious problem.”

Uber-wonk Nate Silver dismantles the media’s lame frame in his look “at the most recent polling on some of the agenda items Mr. Obama laid out:”:

The PollingReport.com database includes two polls on global warming conducted after the Nov. 6 presidential election. An Associated Press-GfK poll in the field from Nov. 29 to Dec. 3 found that 78 percent of respondents said they believed the planet had warmed over the past 100 years, and 49 percent said they thought global warming would be a “very serious” problem for the United States if left unaddressed (31 percent said they thought it would be “somewhat serious”).

Fifty-seven percent of the 1,002 adults surveyed said the United States government should do “a great deal” or “quite a bit” on global warming.

A United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll conducted Nov. 8 to 11 found that 57 percent of adults said they thought global warming was increasing the likelihood of storms like Hurricane Sandy.

I guess liberals are now a (silent) majority in this country!

Even the WashPost‘s own economic and White House reporter, Zachary A. Goldfarb, mocks this media spin in his piece, “Obama’s daring liberal agenda is neither daring nor liberal. Discuss”: