There are days I wonder if Santorum has a speechwriter or if the crazy stuff that keeps flowing out of his mouth is really all his own invention. Actually, that’s not true. I don’t wonder about this at all. No speechwriter would be that stupid.
In any case, Here’s Ricky making his case that it’s the Liberal Democrats, not the Conservative Republicans who are “anti-science.”
In his remarks Monday, Santorum went beyond his usual discussion of the importance of increasing domestic energy production to deliver a blistering attack on environmental activists. He said global warming claims are based on “phony studies,” and that climate change science is little more than “political science.”
His views are not “anti-science” as Democrats claim, Santorum said. “When it comes to the management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones. We are the ones who stand for science, and technology, and using the resources we have to be able to make sure that we have a quality of life in this country and (that we) maintain a good and stable environment,” he said to applause, and cited local ordinances to reduce coal dust pollution in Pittsburgh during the heyday of coal mining.
Yes, because denying climate science is real makes you pro-science, whereas doing research in the field for decades makes you a practitioner of phony science. Just ask Michael Mann.
Mann’s story of what he calls the climate wars, the fight by powerful entrenched interests to undermine and twist the science meant to guide government policy, starts to seem pretty much on the money. He’s telling it in a book out on 6 March, The hockey stick and the climate wars: Dispatches from the front lines.
“They see scientists like me who are trying to communicate the potential dangers of continued fossil fuel burning to the public as a threat. That means we are subject to attacks, some of them quite personal, some of them dishonest.” Mann said in an interview conducted in and around State College, home of Pennsylvania State University, where he is a professor. [….]
“A day doesn’t go by when I don’t have to fend off some attack, some specious criticism or personal attack,” he said. “Literally a day doesn’t go by where I don’t have to deal with some of the nastiness that comes out of a campaign that tries to discredit me, and thereby in the view of our detractors to discredit the entire science of climate change.”
And who can forget that Rick Santorum has openly called for the teaching of creationism in schools as a counterweight to evolution, despite no evidence that creationism has any validity outside those who believe the Bible is the only true source of knowledge about the world.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum says the “left” and “scientific community” have monopolized the public school system’s curriculum, only permitting the teaching of evolution and leaving no room for the introduction of creation-based theories in the classroom.
“There are many on the left and in the scientific community, so to speak, who are afraid of that discussion because oh my goodness you might mention the word, God-forbid, ‘God’ in the classroom, or ‘Creator,’ that there may be some things that are inexplainable by nature where there may be, where it’s actually better explained by a Creator, and of course we can’t have that discussion,” Santorum said in an editorial interview with the Nashua Telegraph. “It’s very interesting that you have a situation where science will only allow things in the classroom that are consistent with a non-Creator idea of how we got here, as if somehow or another that’s scientific. Well maybe the science points to the fact that maybe science doesn’t explain all these things. And if it does point to that, then why don’t you pursue that? But you can’t, because it’s not science, but if science is pointing you there how can you say it’s not science? It’s worth the debate.”
Isn’t it terrible that Scientists have dominated the discussion of what constitutes the science curriculum that should be taught in schools? Why that leaves no chance for religion to provide input into what science really is. Sort of like churches have dominated the discussion on what religion is, without allowing scientists to participate in that debate.
I have to admit, outside of the people who think we should make all our policy decisions based on prayer (preferably of the “right” Christian variety), I can’t see how this idiocy will play with the general electorate. I know such outrageous claims are helping Santorum now in the Republican primaries — that and the fact that his version of Catholicism is more acceptable to fundamentalist Protestants in the GOP base than Romney’s Mormon beliefs — but I fail to see how it will benefit him in the general election among people who do not share his beliefs that climate science and evolution are “phony” and are attempts to “deceive the public.”
I have to agree with BooMan, I want Obama to run against Santorum. The man is a walking, talking religious zealot and he apparently makes no bones about hiding that fact. In all honesty, I can’t see his brand of radical conservative extremism playing well with the general electorate this Fall.