They'd rather kill their own children than admit a hippie was right about something
by digby
Bradblog caught Joe Scarborough defending Marco Rubio's cretinous position on climate change --- and then let the cat out of the bag: the problem isn't that climate change isn't real, it's that liberals are extremely concerned about it. That's right. If there's one thing American conservatives really hate it's extremism.
Scarborough: I don't think it's [the base's rejection of] science. In fact, I know it's not [the base's rejection of] science...On this issue, I think, speaking of televangelists, I think the far left overplayed their hand. Back in '02, '03, '04, '05, Al Gore overplayed his hand. You can look at polls --- don't listen to me, look at the polling numbers from 2004, 2005, 2006 --- Americans were actually bought in to the concept of climate change and that we need to move aggressively on it. Since that time, since the overreach, since there were the climate versions of the Salem Witch Trials, where if you didn't believe in the most extreme view, that you were anti-science --- not only did Republicans wander away from this issue, but check the polling --- most Americans began wandering away from this issue. They overplayed it.
...I think a lot of Republicans might agree with Marco, reflexively, going against this sort of extremism, Willie [Geist], that I was talking about before, but I would guess, I don't know, I haven't seen polls on this, but certainly most of the Republicans I talk to really believe there is climate change, they are smart enough to believe that seven billion, eight billion people have had a huge impact on it, especially what's happening in China --- China's the number one producer of damage to the environment now --- but they're not willing to just start shutting down factories and changing the way America does things tomorrow to throw millions and millions of people out of work. I don't know. I think there's some subtlety there.
Geist:You get the sense that yes, Republicans who disagree with this point of view do disagree, but they also resent being hit over the head with it for a decade and people saying, 'Fall in line or else.' It doesn't mean they're right, but you get that idea that this is now a sort of a reaction to that reaction from Al Gore
Scarborough: (after insisting that he wasn't bashing Gore but merely criticizing his "televangelist" approach) I think there have to be those people that are out there that are pushing hard and go as hard as they can go in one direction or another, and I'm really glad he did it and he drew a lot of attention to that. I personally believed that he overreached and that a lot of people overreached.
Brzezinski Why are we talking about Al Gore? If it was someone more substantial, we should talk more, but it was Marco Rubio overplaying to the base. I suggest we move on...In order to defend him you have to loop all the way around to Al Gore and extremism. It was a long road to defend him there. Think about that one. It took you five minutes to explain why Marco Rubio was okay in his answering and it wasn't. It was a bad answer.
Scarborough: Then let me do it in five seconds. A lot of us [on the right] believe the left have overreached on this issue and we're not going to throw people out of work because of their ideological rampages.
In fact, we're going to stomp our little feet and hold our breath until the planet is unihabitable because we don't like the icky liberals being all exercised about this thing. Also too: Al Gore is fat.
Keep in mind that Scarborough is supposed to be one of the more reasonable conservatives. He's got a flagship show on the liberal cable news network he's so reasonable.
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And he admits that he and others are rejecting the consensus of 95% of scientists because they don't like hippies.
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