Anyway the paper listed a number of funny reasons and the last reason conservatives don’t like McCain is because ‘McCain is soft on hate.’ That’s the truest line I’ve heard in a long time. Many of the conservative commentators make their living on getting people to hate something and what better thing to hate than the United Nations and then the IPCC report and a bunch of people who want to take their fossil fuels away from them. And then John McCain comes along and says we should listen to the IPCC and the UN, conservative talk show jocks have about had a cow over that.

McCain is soft on hate. How could he ever get the conservative endorsement . He’s got an uphill battle.

The problem is more fundamental. It has to do with the populous’ (and talk show hosts’) preference for black and white answers to questions about complex issues that have uncertainty in the known knowns and known unknowns and that also have many unknown unknowns.

Do you think all the supposed interest in and excitement about the coming Presidential election will get more than half the eligible voters to the polls? Why not?

What’s your number one issue? Would you sacrifice your number two and three priority issues to have a candidate who supported your views on the number one issue? Let’s say issues number one, two, and three are economy (stupid), war, and climate change. Did I get your issue? You mean you don’t care about having a job, how much tax you have to pay, whether you can get or afford health care, the quality of education for your child(ren), or whether you can afford the house, car, or vacation that you strongly desire? Am I getting the point across yet?

Have you ever worked in a group that was formed as a coalition of purportedly like-minded or logically-connected one-issue-oriented groups? Organizing against the Vietnam War in the late 60s and early 70s, I found myself in such contexts often. Everyone wanted to add their issue as number 2 right after stopping the war. Labor, feminists, farmworkers’ rights, minority issues, gay rights (this was in Berkeley and San Francisco), … I can’t even remember them all, there were so many. There were no simple answers. And I still don’t believe that WE stopped the war, although many of my allies from those years said that they believe we did when we talked about during our marches to demonstrate against the invasion of Iraq earlier this decade.

OK. so what does this have to do with climate change, you ask. Would you vote for McCain if he and his running mate had a better position on climate change than the Dem nominee? In spite of his commitment to 100 years more in Iraq?

McCain is the divisive candidate in this election. Let’s hope he splits the GOP into tiny pieces. If making Pawlenty a fellow sacrificial lamb drives the right wing even away from reality, so be it.

http://www.nga.org/ portal/ site/ nga/ menuitem.b14a675ba7f89cf9e8ebb856a11010a0

The main theme, promoted by Gov. Pawlenty (and Selebius), was ‘Securing a Clean Energy Future’
(click on CFL icon). Announcing that initiative was his first act as new chairman for 07-08.

http://www.nga.org/ Files/ pdf/ 07PAWLENTYBROCHURE.PDF

Scary Ideas for Paleozoic Pols.