Conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote pieces rejecting Will’s argument. Unwilling to simply register his own friendly disagreement, Donald Trump trashed Will in more colorful terms, calling him a “fool” and a “hack” on Fox & Friends yesterday.

This morning on CNBC, Trump — who has endorsed Mitt Romney for president and is a high-profile surrogate for the campaign — took his animus against Will to a more distasteful level, mocking his personal appearance:

I think George Will is a loser. … He actually spoke for me at Mar-A-Lago a long time ago, I was very unimpressed. … You take away his little round spectacles and his cute little greasy haircut, and I think he probably realizes he’s not a very smart guy.

CNBC host Joe Kernen light-heartedly quipped, “You sure it’s good idea to be making fun of someone else’s hair?” “Well, I have a beautiful crop of hair,” Trump responded, reassuring the audience, “It’s actually not a comb-over.” Watch it:

Later, Will said, “I didn’t even get to finish my list,” to which he added, “absurd rhetorical grandiosity.”

Gingrich is reeling from revelations that he was paid over a million dollars to peddle influence for failed mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Even disgraced former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff has called Gingrich “corrupt[].”

Responding to Will, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman quipped that Gingrich is “a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Let me turn to you George and ask you about the unemployment numbers. Is that something of a trend or is that scratching the surface? What difference is that going to make?

WILL: Not much. First of all, 80,000 isn’t nearly enough to accomodate even the natural growth month by month of the workforce. There are two bits of good news in there. The 80,000 is a net number. The private sector created 104,000 jobs. The public sector happily shrank by 24,000 jobs. Both of that’s good.

Watch the clip:

Conservatives rejoice at public sector job loss because they think it will spur private job creation (and also fulfill their collective fantasy of controlling the ever encroaching tentacles of the federal government). But the reality is that public sector losses are equaling out private sector gains and thus holding back a wider recovery. And as Matt Yglesias has noted, public sector job loss over the last yeah and a half has not been “delivering any private sector magic.” Federal, state and local governments have shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past year alone while the percentage of millionaires grew by 20 percent. And as the AP noted, the public job “losses add strain” on the overall economic recovery.

“As we’ve seen that federal support for states diminish, you’ve seen the biggest job losses in the public sector — teachers, police officers, firefighters losing their jobs,” President Obama said this summer trying to push his jobs plan that Republicans continually object to.

But to George Will, this is all a good thing; he celebrates when Americans lose their jobs with the unemployment rate stagnant at 9 percent.

Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable, he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate: Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the tea party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.

Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from ‘data’ …. Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for THIS?

Has conservatism come so far that it denounces someone because they supposedly follow data?

In fact, Romney isn’t driven by data or the facts — see Mitt Romney IS a Member of a Cult: Likely GOP Nominee Asserts, “We Don’t Know What’s Causing Climate Change.” He is a finger-in-the-wind politician.

But what’s even more pathetic is that anti-data Will wrote an op-ed in January bemoaning the fact that “the nation depends on nourishing [scientists] and the institutions that sustain them.”

I wrote about Will’s hypocrisy back then and will excerpt that post below.

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George Will — a ‘thought-leader’ for a movement that indiscriminately opposes essentially all increases in federal spending and that wants to put climate scientist on trial — has a Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “Rev the scientific engine.”

Will attacks science for a living (see “the Washington Post lets George Will reassert all his climate falsehoods plus some new ones” and links below).  But now he urges his fellow deniers, who now control of the US House of Representatives, to read up on the key role science plays in sustaining the economic vitality of the nation — and the crucial role government plays in advancing science:

One is William Rosen’s book “The Most Powerful Idea in the World,” a study of the culture of invention. Another is the National Academy of Sciences report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited,” an addendum to a 2005 report on declining support for science and engineering research.

Such research is what canals and roads once were — a prerequisite for long-term economic vitality.

Uhh, yeah.  Rosen’s book about the development of the steam engine explains that “the innovative culture that blossomed in the 18th-century Britain” depended critically not just on individual innovators, but also on government support, including “a sort of seventeenth-century equivalent of the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.”  The NAS report explicitly endorses the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which supports next-generation clean energy technology development, much as the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy that I once ran does.

But the right-wing, led by its anti-science and anti-technology pundits like Will, have long worked to hobble clean energy R&D. Reagan cut the renewable energy R&D budget 85% after he took office (see “Who got us in this energy mess? Start with Ronald Reagan“).  Thanks to conservative opposition to clean energy from Reagan to the Gingrich Congress to Cheney/Bush, the U.S. share of the PV market has plummeted.  By 2008, America had under 6% (!) of the world market (see AllBusiness’s “United States is a bit player in global solar industry“).   Finally, right wingers blocked the comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs legislation that was our best chance of generating the kind of funding needed to compete with China’s staggering investment in energy R&D.

It is beyond disingenuous for Will to trumpet the benefits of science and engineering research, when he has done as much as anyone else to undermine the national consensus that once existed for such research.

The first Republican president revered Henry Clay, whose “American System” stressed spending on such “internal improvements.” Today, the prerequisites for economic dynamism are ideas.

Deborah Wince-Smith of the Council on Competitiveness says: “Talent will be the oil of the 21st century.” And the talent that matters most is the cream of the elite. The late Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod said, “Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries are made by 1 percent of the scientists.”

With populism rampant, this is not a propitious moment to defend elites, even scientific ones. Nevertheless, the nation depends on nourishing them and the institutions that sustain them.

Seriously.  For the record, the Council on Competitiveness supports the kind of aggressive federal effort on technology development and deployment conservatives have long opposed — including raising the price of fossil fuels to “include the costs that are not currently reflected in their prices such as the impact of oil imports were not security and trade deficit and the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.”  Someone like Will has no business quoting the CoC.

And it may be the most laughable statement ever published in the Washington Post for Will to say we need to “defend” scientists, when he has probably done more than anybody writing for the Post to attack them.  We know the Washington Post doesn’t fact-check their opinion pieces (see The day DC journalism died: Washington Post is staffed with people who found ZERO mistakes in George Will’s error-filled denial column and Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?).

But does anybody working for the paper actually read his columns at all?  If they did, they might have pointed out to him that just four months ago, he published one of his typical extended anti-scientist screeds — see “George Will embraces Walter Russell Mead’s risible anti-science revisionism.”

Will’s hypocrisy is beyond belief.  It is Will’s fellow conservatives, with his help and encouragement, who have famously been engaging in a War on Science, as my friend and fellow blogger Chris Mooney put it.

The result, as DOE’s Assistant Secretary for Policy, David Sandalow recently put it:

I think skepticism about science puts the United States at competitive disadvantages. Other countries are marching forward in the 21st century, to deploy new technologies. That creates wealth.

And let’s not forget which political movement opposes teaching evolution in school.  The National Center for Science Education notes about creationism that “students who accept this material as scientifically valid are unlikely to succeed in science courses at the college level.”

And yet Will bemoans:

U.S. undergraduate institutions award 16 percent of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering; South Korea and China award 38 percent and 47 percent, respectively. America ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

America has been consuming its seed corn: From 1970 to 1995, federal support for research in the physical sciences, as a fraction of gross domestic product, declined 54 percent; in engineering, 51 percent. On a per-student basis, state support of public universities has declined for more than two decades and was at the lowest level in a quarter-century before the current economic unpleasantness. Annual federal spending on mathematics, the physical sciences and engineering now equals only the increase in health-care costs every nine weeks.

A conservative whining that state support for public universities has declined?  I apologize for not putting the head-vise warning on this head-exploding post.

Reublicans are rightly determined to be economizers. They must, however, make distinctions. Congressional conservatives can demonstrate that skill by defending research spending that sustains collaboration among complex institutions – corporations’ research entities and research universities. Research, including in the biological sciences, that yields epoch-making advances requires time horizons that often are impossible for businesses, with their inescapable attention to quarterly results.

An iconic conservative understood this. Margaret Thatcher, who studied chemistry as an Oxford undergraduate, said:

“Although basic science can have colossal economic rewards, they are totally unpredictable. And therefore the rewards cannot be judged by immediate results. Nevertheless, the value of [Michael] Faraday’s work today must be higher than the capitalization of all shares on the stock exchange.”

That, of course, is precisely why the Chinese are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on clean energy research and development.

Again, Will makes the progressive case for aggressive spending on R&D.  Too bad none of his fellow conservatives understand any of this.  Will ends:

Richard Levin, economist and Yale’s president, asks: Would Japan’s growth have lagged since 1990 “if Microsoft, Netscape, Apple and Google had been Japanese companies”? Japan’s failure has been a failure to innovate. As “Gathering Storm” says: Making the government lean by cutting the most defensible – because most productive – federal spending is akin to making an overweight aircraft flight-worthy by removing an engine.

For the record, DARPA grants led to the first computer time-sharing system, the first local area computer network, the idea of the personal computer, as well as the menu-and icon-driven software used in the first Apple Macintosh. As the Harvard Business School case study on DARPA explains:

[DARPA] supplied grants and, later, the venture capital, to fund development of artificial intelligence and parallel processing computers. In fact, in the late 1960s, it designated four research institutions — Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, and MIT — as academic centers for the study of computers and computing; using agency seed money, DARPA virtually single-handedly created the United States’ position of world leadership in computer sciences.  (The four DARPA-funded centers would train, directly or indirectly, nearly every computer sciences expert in the nation.)

That is precisely the kind of aggressive, across-the-board effort we need to match the Chinese and restore US leadership in clean energy — leadership that conservatives like Will have done so much to kill.

It took a staggering amount of hypocrisy for Will to publish the January piece.

And it takes a staggering amount of hypocrisy for Will to attack Romney for supposedly being driven by data, as, of course, scientists are.

So is Will pro-data and pro-science or anti-data and anti-science?  Or both?  If Romney is the pretzel candidate, then Will is the pretzel columnist.

Related Posts:

• The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages
• Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie
• Washington Post reporters take unprecedented step of contradicting columnist George Will in a news article

Yet, for all of Will’s willingness to carry water for the most repulsive and out of touch ideas, even he is offended by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R) plan to rig the Electoral College in order to elect a Republican president in 2012:

Republicans supposedly revere the Constitution, but in its birthplace, Pennsylvania, they are contemplating a subversion of the Framers’ institutional architecture. Their ploy — partisanship masquerading as altruism about making presidential elections more “democratic” — will weaken resistance to an even worse change being suggested.

Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature may pass, and the Republican governor promises to sign, legislation ending the state’s practice — shared by 47 other states — of allocating all of its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. Pennsylvania would join Maine and Nebraska in allocating one vote to the winner in each congressional district, with the two remaining votes going to the statewide popular vote winner. [...] The Electoral College today functions differently than the Founders envisioned — they did not anticipate political parties — but it does buttress the values encouraged by the federalism the Framers favoured, which Pennsylvanians, and others, should respect.

As with most Will columns, there is also a lot to not like in his rejection of the Pennsylvania vote rigging plan. Among other things, the “even worse change” Will refers to is the entirely sensible National Popular Vote compact, which would ensure that the person who gets the most votes actually gets to be president of the United States. Nevertheless, Will’s break with Corbett on Corbett’s plan to rig the presidential election is a hopeful sign that establishment conservatives are turning against that plan.

But Hiatt is back to publishing disinformation on climate science by Will.  In his Friday column, Will poses a debate question for Jon Huntsman:

You, who preen about having cornered the market on good manners, recently tweeted, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Call you sarcastic. In the 1970s, would you have trusted scientists predicting calamity from global cooling? Are scientists a cohort without a sociology — uniquely homogenous and unanimous, without factions or interests and impervious to peer pressures or the agendas of funding agencies? Are the hundreds of scientists who are skeptical that human activities are increasing global temperatures not really scientists?

In fact, an excellent 2008 review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) debunked that “pervasive myth” of “scientists predicting calamity from global cooling” and found “the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.

A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then….

When the myth of the 1970s global cooling scare arises in contemporary discussion over climate change, it is most often in the form of citations not to the scientific literature, but to news media coverage.

The authors put together this figure on “the number of papers classified as predicting, implying, or providing supporting evidence for future global cooling, warming, and neutral categories”:

The article ends with a powerful discussion of what the National Research Council concluded in its 1979 review of the science:

In July 1979 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Jule Charney, one of the pioneers of climate modeling, brought together a panel of experts under the U.S. National Research Council to sort out the state of the science. The panel’s work has become iconic as a foundation for the enterprise of climate change study that followed (Somerville et al. 2007). Such reports are a traditional approach within the United States for eliciting expert views on scientific questions of political and public policy importance (Weart 2003).

In this case, the panel concluded that the potential damage from greenhouse gases was real and should not be ignored. The potential for cooling, the threat of aerosols, or the possibility of an ice age shows up nowhere in the report. Warming from doubled CO2 of 1.5°-4.5°C was possible, the panel reported. While there were huge uncertainties, Verner Suomi, chairman of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, wrote in the report’s foreword that he believed there was enough evidence to support action: “A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late” (Charney et al. 1979).

Clearly, if a national report in the 1970s advocates urgent action to address global warming, then the scientific consensus of the 1970s was not global cooling.

As for the other bunk in Will’s piece, Media Matters dismantles it:

By Contrast, The Vast Majority Of Climate Experts Say Humans Are Warming The Planet

WILL: He’s been out of elective office for 12 years. … Newt Gingrich’s problems are so far beyond just his multiple marriages and all that. His ethanol love affair right now. ON the 7th of March he said, “Let’s go Qaddafi.” On the 23rd of he says, “I never favored intervention.” He did it on television. … He’s one of these people who says that to understand Barack Obama you need to understand his “Kenyan anti-colonial mentality.” This is just not a serious candidate.

Watch it:

On ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will responded to Republican opposition to raising the national debt ceiling and the threat it poses to the fiscal solvency of the nation:

I know of no other developed nation that has a debt ceiling. This is a purely recurring symbolic vote to make people feel good by voting against it.

The trouble is it’s suicidal if you should happen to miscalculate and have all kinds of people voting against it as a symbolic vote and turn out to be a majority. Because if the United States defaults on its sovereign debt, the markets will be — well, it will be stimulating.

Watch it:

Will’s analysis echoed remarks made earlier by Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, on ABC’s This Week. “The debt ceiling is not something to toy with,” stated Goolsbee. “If we get to the point where you’ve damaged the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.” Goolsbee also noted that the impact of blocking a debt ceiling raise on the economy would be “catastrophic” and would bring on “a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008.”

We’ve seen, repeatedly, that Fred Hiatt thinks it’s not a problem if George Will wants to use his Washington Post column to mislead people about facts. But Will’s decided to enter a new kind of loathesomeness with this characterization of where one might meet a Hispanic:

Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood — some even before it was a territory. They were in America before most Americans’ ancestors arrived. Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

I suppose it’s true that professional rightwingers like George Will might not encounter Hispanics in any other context. And the fact that racism seems to have such a welcome home in the conservative movement guarantees that will continue to be true for a while.

Meanwhile, I might suggest that conservative Arizona fans cogitate a bit on the fact that there are a large number of conservative Cuban American Republican Party politicians in this country and as best I can tell none of them approve of this law. Why do they think that is?

Anyways, the Post has a snazzy new PostPolitics page that helps you swiftly summarize the fact that there don’t appear to be any Hispanic opinion writers at the paper who might be able to have a word or two with Will about this.

There’s another test, and it’s wielded by my conservatives, and I think it’s mistaken. And that is, they say they’re against judicial activism. By which they mean they want the court to defer to the elected political branches of government. But if you look at what’s happened recently, the decision that most outraged conservatives was the Kelo decision on eminent domain. … The court did defer to the city government in Connecticut and it enraged conservatives. The recent decision that most pleased conservatives — Citizens United, overturning part of McCain-Feingold — was the court not deferring to the Senate.

Watch it:

Cokie Roberts noted, “that’s very relevant right now, because you have these 14 states’ attorneys general, saying that they want to overturn, the court to overturn the recently passed health care law.”

Apparently deeming himself a Nobel laureate of “Washington wisdom,” Will proceeded to offer a dose of his brilliance. “One of the ways that this simple, workable legislation is going to be made to work is the IRS is going to hire about 16,000 new agents,” Will proclaimed. That may be Will’s version of “Washington wisdom,” but it’s not true. This past week, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman debunked the right-wing myth that IRS agents are going to auditing taxpayers to determine if they have health insurance.

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.

Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:

PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

Watch it:

Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:

KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.

Also on This Week, conservative pundit George Will praised Obama’s process on Afghanistan, stating, “Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point.”

Transcript:

WILL: Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action.

The question of whether an actual troop request was made with any sense of urgency is not clear to me. The fact that one is being made by McChrystal — and whether it’s 40,000 or whether the 40,000 represents a negotiated down from 80,000 request is something that I don’t know and we should know after careful, protracted deliberation.

PODESTA: I think that the deliberation that’s going on is actually exemplary, and I completely agree with George on this. It seems that the Bush administration, for eight months, did sit on Gen. McKiernan’s request for more troops, which Obama —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s because the troops just weren’t there. It wasn’t the President saying, “I’m not going to do this if the troops are there.” They just didn’t have them.

PODESTA: Well, I don’t know, I never heard Vice President Cheney going off and giving a speech assaulting President Bush for not acting on those requests at that time. And they did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

So they handed him off a problem, and it’s a deep and difficult one, and I think he’s doing the appropriate thing by taking his time before he commits to not what looks to be surge, but what looks to be something that would commit the United States to these high troop levels for a very long time in Afghanistan.

By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere “plateau,” not warming’s apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

By this logic, we’d have to conclude that the Toronto Blue Jays just clinched the A.L. East division title — after all, they’ve won six games in a row and are 9-1 in their last ten games, while the New York Yankees lost their last game and are only 7-3. (In reality, the Yankees have clinched the division title.) However, when ThinkProgress contacted Will to confirm this theory, he responded:

You don’t seem to understand baseball. The Blue Jays are not even in contention.

Will’s persistent assertion that global warming has stopped during the hottest decade in recorded history is just as nonsensical as the idea that a team that is nine games below .500 is beating one that is 45 games above .500. Unfortunately, Will hung up before we could ask who he believed was the hottest team in baseball.

The Wonk Room has more.

Washington Post opinion page editor Fred Hiatt continued to disgrace his paper, publishing yet another column questioning climate science by George Will, the seventh this year. “Cooling Down the Cassandras” (alternatively titled “For Alarmists, Ugly Truths on Global Warming”) is a master class in cherrypicking words and misinterpreting science. Will’s thesis — that there has been no global warming since 1998 — is based on his reading of a poorly written article about temperature trends by New York Times climate reporter Andy Revkin:

By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere “plateau,” not warming’s apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

By Will’s logic, we’d have to conclude that the Toronto Blue Jays just clinched the A.L. East division title — after all, they’ve won six games in a row and are 9-1 in their last ten games, while the New York Yankees lost their last game and are only 7-3. However, when the Wonk Room contacted Mr. Will to confirm this theory, he responded:

You don’t seem to understand baseball. The Blue Jays are not even in contention.

Will’s persistent assertion that global warming has stopped during the hottest decade in recorded history is just as nonsensical as the idea that a team that is nine games below .500 is beating one that is 45 games above .500. Unfortunately, Will hung up before we could ask who he believed was the hottest team in baseball.

Essentially, Will’s “global cooling” argument is pinned on an ambiguity of the English language. Just as the Yankees are a winning team but did not win their last game, global warming is terribly real even if 2008, one of the hottest years in recorded history, was cooler than 2007. “Global warming” is popular shorthand for the well-understood phenomenon that the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is amplifying the natural radiative forcing of the troposphere’s temperature — and as the greenhouse pollution continues to rise, the forcing continues to rise, given the natural variability in solar radiation and heat transfer between the ocean and atmosphere. It is not shorthand for “every day will be hotter than the next everywhere on the planet.” As the U.K. Met Office, whose temperature record Will cites in his scientifically illiterate column, explains, it is a “fact” that “temperatures are continuing to rise“:

The rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15 °C per decade since the mid-1970s. Warming has been unprecedented in at least the last 50 years, and the 17 warmest years have all occurred in the last 20 years. This does not mean that next year will necessarily be warmer than last year, but the long-term trend is for rising temperatures.

In fact, the tremendous rise in greenhouse gases — now 396 ppm CO2-equivalents, 115 ppm higher than in pre-industrial times — is having an obvious and accelerating effect on decadal global temperatures, not withstanding the significant natural interannual variability:

Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative. When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

Steyn, a Canadian right-winger who writes for the National Review blog, is not exactly a reliable source for climatological data. As Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization explains, global warming “has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years”:

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

Jarraud’s letter debunking the myth of recent global cooling was published by the Washington Post on March 21, in response to George F. Will’s February 15 denier column.

It may be true that the “dead baby juice” conspiracy wing of the conservative movement is growing, but Fred Hiatt’s continued publication of George Will’s alternate-universe diatribes is a blot on the Washington Post’s reputation.

Here’s some nonsense chart I read in the NYT one time:

A bunch of good people work at the Post, but all things considered it continues to seem to me that the Washington Post Company would be well-advised to focus on its core competency in standardized test preparation services.

Via Ed Kilgore, George Will on the Ricci case:

The nation shall slog on, litigating through a fog of euphemisms and blurry categories (e.g., “race-conscious” actions that somehow are not racial discrimination because they “remedy” discrimination that no one has intended). This is the predictable price of failing to simply insist that government cannot take cognizance of race.

Obviously, this kind of sentiment from a leading light of the conservative movement would be more credible had the conservative movement taken the side of racial justice during the civil rights era. Instead, we got things like National Review’s memorable denunciation of the weak-tea Civil Rights Act of 1957:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by meerely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

Dwight Eisenhower could see that this was wrong and backed the ’57 bill. But Ike was a RINO, the kind of person George Will would despise.

But that’s the past, of course, and we can’t hold Will personally responsible for the things his predecessors were saying fifty years ago. But here’s the question—how is it that I can’t recall an instance of Will waxing indignant about some instance of racism directed against an African-American or Latino in the United States? I don’t believe it’s my faulty memory. Instead, I believe it’s that the new “color blind” American right is not dramatically different from the old “black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote” American right from fifty years ago. It’s a movement that’s basically indifferent to the interests of non-whites and totally uninterested in the question of whether or not there’s unfair discrimination against minority groups in the United States.

The president is being roundly criticized for insufficient, rhetorical support for what’s going on over there. It seems to me foolish criticism. The people on the streets know full well what the American attitude toward the regime is. And they don’t need that reinforced.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the people trying to loudly position themselves as the Iranian people’s greatest friends are the exact same people who wanted to drop bombs on Iranians just a couple of weeks ago.

]]> http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2009/06/21/193407/george-will-calls-right-wing-iran-attacks-on-obama-foolish/feed/ 33 http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/06/21/46843/will-iran-foolish-criticism/ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/06/21/46843/will-iran-foolish-criticism/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:11:38 +0000 Ben Armbruster http://thinkprogress.org/?p=46843 Since turmoil broke out in Iran over the country’s disputed elections last week, conservatives have been forcefully criticizing President Obama for not doing enough to intervene on the side of those protesting. Their criticism comes despite numerous expert opinions — even from Iranian human rights activists — that the U.S. should not meddle in the situation. This morning on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continued the attacks. “He’s been timid and passive more than i would like,” he said of Obama. Later on the program though, conservative columnist George Will called such criticism “foolish”:

WILL: The president is being roundly criticized for insufficient, rhetorical support for what’s going on over there. It seems to me foolish criticism. The people on the streets know full well what the American attitude toward the regime is. And they don’t need that reinforced.

Watch it:

In her Wall Street Journal column yesterday, Peggy Noonan, another conservative columnist and former speechwriter for President Reagan, denounced the right-wing attacks, particularly those from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). “To insist the American president, in the first days of the rebellion, insert the American government into the drama was shortsighted and mischievous,” she wrote, adding that “the ayatollahs were only too eager to demonize the demonstrators as mindless lackeys of the Great Satan Cowboy Uncle Sam, or whatever they call us this week.”

]]> http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/06/21/46843/will-iran-foolish-criticism/feed/ 88 http://thinkprogress.org/media/2009/05/20/184406/rep-blumenauer-challenges-george-will-to-a-debate-on-portland/ http://thinkprogress.org/media/2009/05/20/184406/rep-blumenauer-challenges-george-will-to-a-debate-on-portland/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 14:01:12 +0000 Matthew Yglesias http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/?p=32106

Hot in my inbox, a statement from Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who represents Portland in Congress and is one of the main leaders on transportation policy in the House, responding to George Will’s cranky anti-Portland column:

“In his article, Mr. Will proves that he is mired in a one-dimensional past, one that the city of Portland has successfully overcome. He opposes policies that will provide Americans with more choices while saving them money, creating jobs and protecting the environment. In Portland we have been able to increase productivity, boost our economy, and invest in our city’s resources by taking a well-rounded approach to transportation. Secretary LaHood shares this comprehensive view on transportation options for our nation—its not about behavior modification its about giving Americans the freedom to choose more than just the highway or byway.

Rather than pontificate about practicality from a far, I challenge Mr. Will to come experience Portland, and then debate the facts, the future and the visions we offer. I am proud to defend the Portland model so painstakingly developed and implemented over the last 1/3 of a century. Maybe he will understand why young well educated people move here without jobs and older, well established business and professional people won’t leave for jobs that pay more. We will be happy to buy his plane ticket and give him a bottle of Oregon pinot to die for.

I’m mostly wondering what Newsweek intends to do about the large, material factual error in Will’s column. When Will penned an error-ridden Washington Post column on climate change, the Post steadfastly refused to issue a correction and key Post personnel defended Will’s right to lie in the Post’s pages. Strangely, during the weeks of ensuing controversy the Post ran several opinion pieces that, accurately, pointed out that Will was misleading people and some of the Post’s news personnel offered similar comments. Still, Will’s editors and the Post opinion section continued to stand solidly behind the principle that accuracy isn’t important to them—at least as long as George Will is the author.

Newsweek is an editorially separate entity, but also owned by The Washington Post Company. Perhaps the Post’s decision to greenlight lying led Will to believe he could get away with similar misrepresentations in Newsweek. I’ll be interested to see if that proves to be the case.

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