White Flag With Green Trim

Remember when Jim Geraghty stepped in it with Hugh Hewitt by writing that Mitt Romney is "odd"?  Now he's crossed the biggest dog in the right-wing punditocratic yard, and on one of his - and what should be every conservative's, including J-Ger - top hot buttons:

Rush Limbaugh is the King Leonidas of the conservative movement, but I'm struck by how regularly he jokes about the concept of global warming. A lot of his radio talk show brethren are in the same boat, saying day after day, 'hey, cold weather today. So much for global warming.'  The problem is, they're only preaching skepticism to the converted. The independents and the centrists and the soccer moms and everybody whose vote is needed in the general election is already convinced that it's happening. Whenever there's a big storm or unusual weather, they buy into it. If you put the finest skeptical scientists and researchers from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and American Enterprise Institute into a room with a couple hundred Americans, and let them talk until they're blue in the face, I'm not sure how much you would move the dials.

J-Ger sounds rather defeatist, doesn't he?  R-Lim certainly thought so:

So the argument being advanced here by Mr. Geraghty is, don't argue whether it's true or not.  Accept the Democrat premise that it is true, accept the liberal premise that it is true and come up with better ideas.  This is like telling a defense lawyer that if you know that the jury thinks your client is guilty, just accept it and bargain for a lesser sentence.  That's not what good defense lawyers do.  They try to persuade the jury that they are wrong if they think somebody's guilty.  One of the things I consider my business to be here is persuasion in a lot of ways, not just your thoughts on things, not just your opinions, but if something is genuinely a hoax, and if it's a liberal-sponsored hoax, and if its purpose is to expand the role of government at the expense of liberty, what is happening to us that we say go ahead and accept the premise and come up with better ideas to fix the problem, when some of us are saying that the problem is manufactured and false.  This helped me to understand -- I don't know where Geraghty comes down on McCain, I don't know that, but it's so foreign to what I've always thought conservatives were about. 

I mean, let's accept every Democrat premise that people already accept. Let's accept that Wal-Mart is bad for America; let's accept that oil companies are bad for America, and let's try to convince people we've got a better way of punishing them.  What is this?

It is what Rockefeller Republicans call "pragmatism".  Don't bother fighting the greenstremists on principle; we've already lost, their neoBolshevik lies have become conventional wisdom, so just accept it and move on.  That is pretty much Geraghty's conclusion:

It seems this disagreement comes down to what constitutes, "conceding the issue." Rush contends that by acknowledging that climate change is happening and that humanity has a role, the right will have more or less lost the battle before it starts, and that the fight will inevitably lead to bigger, more powerful government, controlling the use of energy in this country, and all aspects of life that go with it. I would contend that any Republican candidate who says during a general election debate, "I believe that climate change is a hoax, and thus have no policies to address what I see as a fake problem" is toast.

I would point out one thing to J-Ger that he's omitting: "Any Republican candidate" who says during a general election debate that global warming is real, and man-made, and declares that the answer is to stop using fossil fuels cold-turkey - a slick-ified version of which is what Mrs. Clinton will be saying - will still be toast.  Why?  Because he'll be me-tooing the Democrats.  The track record of Republican candidates in national campaigns over the past eighty years who opt for Donk Lite instead of unashamedly (and even defiantly) championing conservatism is, you should pardon the expression, toast at the bottom of a compost heap.

This sort of argument should be familiar to anybody who's not a johnny-come-lately to political analysis.  It is, in fact, a recurring dynamic in election cycles in which the momentum is heavily with the Dems.  Even when it isn't, really.  Republican timidity on any issue made "controversial" by the Enemy Media is legendary.  Usually it centers around social issues.  Every four years Ann Stone's "Republicans For Choice" deploy insisting that the GOP's pro-life platform plank be expunged because it'll "alienate moderates and independents".  The plank is then left in place and ends up not being the detriment they claim.  Now it appears it'll be this global warming nonsense (particularly if McCain swindles his way to the nomination).  "Sailor" gives every appearance of being a True Believer, but even if Mitt Romney can save us from the Sith plot, some sort of GOP global warming capitulation is probably inevitable.

Of course, so is GOP defeat in November.  In all this analysis and ruminating and fulminating about the Republican race, that is the proverbial, well, elephant in the birdcage.  As is becoming one of my recurring themes, the sixteen year irrationality cycle has come 'round again in 2008, and as Geraghty himself has pointed out, this year's is a "credulous electorate" willing to buy into any snake oil, no matter how preposterous, if it'll give them "hope".  Not so much hope for anything, as much as against all the ersatz, media-hyped "crises" - e.g. global warming - that they've been brainwashed through sheer repetition into believing are just around the corner if we don't "do something."  Meanwhile, real such crises like a nuclear Iran and the looming insolvency of the major entitlements programs like Social Security and Medicare are never mentioned and are forbidden topics.

Most voters evidently do not want true "straight talk," which is one of the reasons that Fred Thompson is no longer in the race and John McCain is.  They want to be fed what their itching ears have been indoctrinated to hear, and in such an anti-intellectual, symbolism-over-substance environment, no Republican is going to win, even if he shaves his head, paints half his scalp green and gets an Al Gore tattoo on the other half.

In a way, I suppose I'm conceding most of J-Ger's point.  What I'm saying is that Rudy or Romney or McCain is going to be toast no matter what they say on whatever issue.  If the public has swallowed BS like global warming whole, with all the statist implications that come along with it, they will have to learn the hard way just what it is they've bought into.

One of J-Ger's emailers expressed the lesson thusly:

[V]oters support "action on climate change" so long as it is relatively cost free. Right now, being "green" means buying biodegradable disposable cups and feeling good about yourself. When it means tax hikes across the board and higher prices for everything you buy, they may suddenly conclude that putting their child through college is more important than feeling good about themselves and being approved by Al Gore.

Those tax hikes and higher prices and bigger government and energy restrictions are coming, gentlebeings.  President Rodham will make certain of it.  And, assuming that global warming indoctrination doesn't become so thorough that people resign themselves to such collectivist misery as the only way to avoid global disaster, they will rebel, 1994-style.  If and when that happens, how exactly will a Republican Party that surrendered to the global warming hysteria back in 2008 be situated to take advantage of it?

As a rule I'm not a subscriber to the "win by losing" argument, but I think this is an exception.  It is written, "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?"  How much less so for a man, and a party, that forfeits his, and its, soul and gains nothing in return?  There will be another election cycle after this one, after all (assuming the Empress allows it).  Speaking unpopular truths may be Goldwater-in-'64-esque now, but in a few years the "toast" could well be in the other toaster.

UPDATE: More of a follow-up thought, actually.  I'm assuming that the master of the Campaign Spot is being sarcastic when he suggests that a Limbaugh-aligned Republican nominee would say, "I believe that climate change is a hoax, and thus have no policies to address what I see as a fake problem."  There are ways to phrase skepticism about global warming that are eminently and entirely reasonable.  How about, "There is no true consensus amongst climatologists as to the existence and/or magnitude of global warming and mankind's role in precipitating it.  The climate models are not yet sophisticated enough to accurately predict what conditions will be decades in the future.  Considering that we have already made significant strides in limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and that emerging economic powerhouses like India and China have not chosen to follow suit, I do not believe it is prudent or justified to impose drastic, economically debilitating measures such as my opponent has proposed until such time as the preponderance of the evidence clearly indicates it is justified to do so."  That statement doesn't call global warming a "hoax" and a "fake problem"; it simply (and perhaps even eloquently) states the facts: We don't know because the evidence one way or the other is inconclusive, and that's no grounds for regulating our country back to the Stone Age.

Of course, the Dems and the Enemy Media would demogogue any such truth-telling - much like Mr. Geraghty did, actually.  Perhaps that helps explain why he believes we should reward such hysterical demogoguery by capitulating to it.