If you need proof that the Village consensus exists, just ponder the fact that this is the only Sunday show that has booked these two highly respected, establishment political theorists:
These aren't crazy partisan bloggers or talk radio hosts flogging ghost written books. These are people who are usually all over the TV with their projects talking to the likes of Andrea Mitchell and Fareed Zakaria and Charlie Rose and Wolf Blitzer. They have sterling reputations and have always been taken seriously.
You see, if I’m wrong, then the press can happily go on doing what it has always done: Splitting the difference between the political left and the political right, and employing “on the one hand, on the other hand” treatments that presume we’re all equally biased, all equally self-interested...just in different directions.
The trouble is, I’ve presented a substantial body of scientific evidence suggesting that this simply isn’t the case. More specifically, the science I’ve presented suggests that the political right and left are quite different animals; that they perceive the world differently and handle evidence differently; and most importantly, that the polarization and the denial of science in modern American politics are fundamentally the fault of the authoritarian right. (Mann and Ornstein argue something very similar about today’s Republican Party.)
In other words, if my book is right, we have to discard much that we thought we knew about politics. If the science of political ideology is right, then the ground shifts beneath us.
It is very natural, then, that a lot of people—centrist journalists perhaps most of all--don’t want to accept what I’m saying. The problem is, where is the scientific counterargument to what I’m saying?
There isn't one, I'm afraid. And that makes the he said/she said/both sides do it Villagers very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that they are figuratively putting their fingers in their ears and singing "tell me lies, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies".
*And by the way, as Mooney mentions elsewhere in his piece, the science doesn't have liberals being perfect. Far from it. We seem to have no attention span, loyalty or commitment to much of anything and we spend more time arguing amongst ourselves than anything else. Which sounds right to me ...
After a state-appointed board of scientists determined that a one meter rise in sea level is likely by the year 2100 — echoing the scientific consensus on the issue — a coastal economic development group called NC-20 decided to push back against the results. They are upset that such an estimate would thwart development along the coast, as it would be illegal to build in the “flood zone” where there is under one meter of elevation.
“If you’re wrong and you start planning today at 39 inches, you could lose millions of dollars in development and 2,000 square miles would be condemned as a flood zone,” Tom Thompson, the chairman of NC-20, told News & Observer of Raleigh.
So, with NC-20′s support, Republican lawmakers circulated Replacement House Bill 819. The key language can be found in section 2, paragraph e:
[Rates of sea level rise] shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.
Scientific American‘s Scott Huler explains why this is completely insane:
North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.
Which, yes, is exactly like saying, do not predict tomorrow’s weather based on radar images of a hurricane swirling offshore, moving west towards us with 60-mph winds and ten inches of rain. Predict the weather based on the last two weeks of fair weather with gentle breezes towards the east. Don’t use radar and barometers; use the Farmer’s Almanac and what grandpa remembers.
. He explains:
—seems as though it is being handled similarly by some in the press. And perhaps there’s a reason: Centrist (aka “mainstream”) journalists might well prefer that the findings of these books not be true.