The US faces disaster on at least three main fronts due to utterly discredited conservative ideology, with a variety of flashpoints on mini-fronts. The Democratic establishment can't even muster an argument that 2+2=4. It doesn't poll well with independents, apparently, since independents have never been polled on it.
(1) We continue the disastrous neo-con "long war" strategy supposedly in response to 9/11, but actually planned beforehand and completely at odds with the nature of the 9/11 attacks and the danger they represent. Our "full spectrum dominance" mentality currently has us facing armed--potentially nuclear--confrontation in Korea, enmeshed in an ever-deepening conflict with Iran, backing a lawless, racist and suicidal Israeli imperialist project, and unable to sustain a stabilizing nuclear weapons treaty with Russia. We are, on all fronts, at war with the very concept of national security. The discredited notion that security comes always and only from total military victory has not had a clear record of success in the American experience since WWII, which ended more than 60 years ago.
(2) Following an undersized stimulus package conceived two years ago, we have essentially reverted to a uncordinated, spasmodic mixture of feeble economic gestures reminiscent of the failed Herbert Hoover Administration of 80 years ago. As Brad DeLong wrote Saturday, in "Foreign Policy: The Four Horsemen of the Teapocalypse":
But we are now into the "recovery," and 2010 has been a very different year. Its horsemen are of a different breed entirely. Where Keynes and his ilk were optimistic believers in the power of technocratic governments to do good, this year's horsemen are practitioners of more dismal sciences: believers that the market metes out judgments that we must suffer -- and that it is our own flawed nature that makes us believe so. In short, it has been a year for Austrian economists Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter, for plutocrat and Great Depression-era Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon -- and, above all, for Friedrich Nietzsche.
There was silence in the seminar room. Richard Kahn broke it. "Do you mean to say," he asked, "that if I were to go out tomorrow and buy a new overcoat, that it would increase unemployment?"
"Yes," said the man in the front of the room, Friedrich von Hayek, "but it would take a long and complicated mathematical argument to explain why."
That is how historian Robert Skidelsky describes Hayek's visit to the proto-Keynesian economists of Cambridge University. It was the 1930s, and Hayek had met them in London to convince them that depressions were not to be avoided or cured, but rather endured. In his thinking, they were righteous karmic payback for past sins against the gods of monetary orthodoxy. Any attempts to cut them short or make them shallower would produce only temporary palliation, at the cost of a fiercer, deeper, and nastier further depression in the future.
Hayek's fellow countryman, Joseph Schumpeter, went further: "Gentlemen!" he announced to his students at Harvard University (there were no ladies). "A depression is healthy! Like a good ice-cold douche!" If depressions did not exist, Schumpeter thought, we would have to invent them. They were "the respiration of the economic mechanism."
Agreeing with Schumpeter was Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon. In his memoirs Hoover was bitter toward many, but bitterest of all toward Mellon, whom he called the head of the "leave it alone liquidationists." Hoover quotes Mellon: "It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people." Hoover opposed Mellon's policies, he said, and worked to undermine them. But what could he do? He was, after all, only the president. And Mellon was Treasury secretary.
(3) Global warming denialism is rampant among new GOP members of Congress. While the actual record of global mean temperatures over the past 150-plus years looks like this:
The conservative fantasy of "natural fluctuations" would imply something wildly different, on the order this:
There is, quite simply, no relationship between what conservatives imagine the climate record to be and what it actually is. They are delusional. And yet, the Democratic establishment, which knows better has not even attempted to mount a serious public education effort to drive the conservative lies out of the "marketplace of ideas".
Meanwhile, the UN Climate Change conference in Cancun opens to almost totaly US media blackout, and Democracy Now! reports:
Thousands of delegates, scientists and activists are gathering in Cancun, Mexico, for the start of a two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference. A new scientific report being issued today reveals that up to a billion people could lose their homes in the next 90 years due to climate change. The report by the Tyndall Center for Climate Change also predicts up to three billion people could lose access to clean water supplies.
Tyndall Center report is here.
And TPM has a story, "'Plagiarized' GOP-Commissioned Climate Change Report Laid Groundwork For Climate-Gate", which begins:
In 2005, the then-chairman of the House Energy Committee, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), a climate change skeptic, commissioned a report that would challenge the data in two major climate change papers, including the popular "hockey stick" theory. In 2006, the Barton-commissioned report was released and heralded by climate change skeptics the country over, laying the groundwork for last year's "Climate-Gate" controversies.
Last week, experts hired by USA Todaydetermined that the report was largely plagiarized.
At the time it was released, climate skeptics, most notably the Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee, touted it as proof that the climate was doing just fine, thank you. Edward Wegman, the George Mason University statistician who wrote the report, testified before the committee and made the cable news rounds.
In short, the "groundwork for Climage-Gate" was far, far sloppier than the work it investigated, . But what's not made crystal clear in TPM's story is that at the same time, back in 2006, the National Academy of Sciences did it's own investigation into the "hockey-stick" controversy over reconstructions of the temperature record over the past two millennia, aAnd RealClimate.org reported on some of its most salient findings, such as:
1) The authors of the report accurately report the considerable uncertainties that were acknowledged by seminal earlier studies. In particular, Mann et al 1999, which was entitled (emphasis added) "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations, emphasized the uncertainties and caveats, particularly with regard to reconstructing large-scale surface temperature patterns prior to about AD 1600
The report makes due note of this (pg. 119 of the report):....
2) The authors accurately note that, despite those uncertainties, the key conclusions reached by those studies (i.e., that hemispheric-scale warmth in recent decades is likely unprecedented over at last the past millennium) have been substantiated by many other studies, and the confidence in those conclusions appears greater, not lesser, after nearly an additional decade of research (pg. 109 of the report):....
3) Despite the attempts of some commentators to attempt conflate the evidence for the existence of human influences on climate with the validity of a single reconstruction (e.g. that of Mann et al) it is quite clear that the evidence for anthropogenic impacts on climate is quite strong irrespective of whether or not the original "hockey stick" is correct. The report makes repeated note of this key point, for example on page 4 of the report:....
4) That it is time for the paleoclimate research community to move ahead of the now tired debates about the 'Hockey Stick".
That was four years ago.
Once again: there is no "there" there. Conservatives are promoting baseless, slanderous conspiracy theories, because the facts are 100% against them. And what are they lying about?
Nothing less than the future of the human race.
It sort of makes WMDs in Iraq look like a joke. Just like George W. Bush said it was for the Versailles press corps.
