The media must really believe Rick Perry can defeat their beloved President Obama for they are coming at the Texas governor with guns blazing.
On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen likened Perry to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy because of his disbelief in manmade global warming:
Whatever global warming might or might not have done to polar bears, it has put Rick Perry’s presidential candidacy at risk. The Republican Texas governor clings to an ice floe of diminishing credibility, emerging in just about a week’s time as intellectually unqualified to be president.
"Intellectually unqualified to be president."
If disbelief in this theory makes one unqualified to be president, Cohen must think almost half of the nation are unqualifed to be Americans. As Gallup reported in March:
Gallup's annual update on Americans' attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question. [...]
"In a sharp turnaround from what Gallup found as recently as three years ago, Americans are now almost evenly split in their views of the cause of increases in the Earth's temperature over the last century."
Yet to Cohen, Perry's beliefs make him a McCarthyite:
Let's look at what Perry actually said that has generated so much consternation by America's global warming-obsessed media:
I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into, that a group of scientists, who in some cases were found to be manipulating this data.
No one can argue with this first sentence, for global warming has certainly been politicized.
As for the manipulation of data, 2009's ClimateGate as well as a myriad of recent findings concerning significant errors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report have clearly proven this.
As for more and more climate scientists "coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change," the website Climate Depot along with the Oregon Global Warming petition continually demonstrate this.
Of course, no one debates "our climates change" or that they've "been changing ever since the earth was formed."
"But I do not buy into, that a group of scientists, who in some cases were found to be manipulating this data."
Given what we've been able to uncover about these scientists in the past couple of years, neither do a growing percentage of Americans according to Gallup:
Since last fall, there have been widespread news accounts of allegations of errors in scientific reports on global warming and alleged attempts by some scientists to doctor the global warming record.
These news reports may well have caused some Americans to re-evaluate the scientific consensus on global warming. Roughly half of Americans now say that "most scientists believe that global warming is occurring," down from 65% in recent years. The dominant opposing thesis, held by 36% of Americans, is that scientists are unsure about global warming. An additional 10% say most scientists believe global warming is not occurring.
The percentage of Americans who think most scientists believe global warming is occurring has dropped 13 points from two years ago, and is the lowest since the first time Gallup asked this question back in 1997.
As such, Perry's views are by no means out of the mainstream - unless, of course, you're a liberal columnist that has bought into Nobel Laureate Al Gore's nonsense hook, line and sinker, and your resolve hasn't been shaken by the findings in the past two years:
List Cohen as part of this intransigent group; he concluded his piece:
It’s not his thinking I fear. It’s the lack of any at all.
Well, if Cohen continues to completely believe in a theory regardless of the holes being blown in it, it is really him and others in his profession that are demonstrating a lack of critical thinking.
Americans are in large numbers beginning to see through the con that folks like Cohen have foisted upon the population, and the press can't stand it. Now they've set their sights on political candidates that are also skeptical.
This might make them feel better about themselves as they try to save their drowning ship, but with public opinion moving against them, they're likely to find they're preaching to a continually diminishing choir.
Even more frustrating for them, those in Perry's pews are growing by the day.
