October 16, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THEY CAN NEVER BE GRACIOUS

There are a few regular right-wing wacko correspondents to The Fresno Bee's letters page. One wacko is a guy I call Mr. Anti-Choice. He usually writes anti-abortion screeds. He would like to impose the Medieval "morality" of the Catholic Church on all of us today. Today Mr. A. C. is aggrieved that Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Prize. Mr. A. C. tries to denigrate the legitimacy of the award, first by saying that the Nobel Committee awarded the Prize a few years ago to that awful Yassar Arafat, thus making the prize "agenda-driven," and then claiming there are nine factual errors in the movie An Inconvenient Truth. I would have to research the alleged errors, but the basic premise of the documentary is true. We do have life-threatening global climate change taking place. The evidence is simply overwhelming. That's a terribly inconvenient concept for right-wingers, who think that we can keep on exploiting natural resources forever with no consequences. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

POSITIVE THINKING VS. REALITY

Probably the most famous proponent of "the power of positive thinking" was Norman Vincent Peale. If you just think positively, it's claimed, you can achieve whatever you want. But all the positive thinking in the world doesn't solve poverty, end war, address global climate change, or cure deadly illnesses. There is another right-wing think tank called The Templeton Foundation that is pushing what amounts to positive thinking. In the meantime, the head of the foundation is a Bush supporter and a supporter of the war in Iraq. This column by Barbara Ehrenreich is at www.thenation.com:

But the Templetons' most famous baby is the young field of Positive Psychology, launched by University of Pennsylvania's Martin Seligman after his five-year-old daughter accused him of being a "grouch" and he resolved improve his outlook. Pos Psych carves out everything ordinary psych, with its bent toward pathology, ignores, which is in itself an admirable ambition. In practice, though, it tilts dangerously, for something that considers itself a science, toward the prescriptive. If you're not happy--or optimistic or upbeat--you better get to work on that now, and we have the "coaches" to help you.

Put all this happiness and optimism together with John Templeton Jr.'s political agenda and you could come up with some pretty paranoid scenarios: for example, that the Templeton Foundation is a plot to numb Americans into smiley-faced acquiescence to the status quo. And could it be a coincidence that Templeton helped finance the re-election of the most optimistic President we've had since Ronald Reagan?