Articles Tagged "Roger L. Simon"

Whatever comes to pass in this election season — whatever scandals emerge, gaffes are gaffed, turns twisted, figures fudged, wars waged, etc. — what I would I most like to see, even if I don’t get to, is the Gingrich-Obama debates.

Conventional modern liberalism (leftism, Keynesian economics, etc.) is dead in our country, indeed in the world, and yet a sizable portion of the populace clings to it. Like a massive cargo cult waiting for John Frum, these people cleave to an ideology that has been useless for years and is self-destructive even to them, most of them anyway, undermining the lives of the rest of us in the process.

Newt Gingrich is the only person I can think of with the rhetorical skills to explain this in a manner in which at least some of these same people, perhaps even enough of them, would understand the situation and change. He could do so in debate with Barack Obama — those Lincoln-Douglas style debates he so assiduously seeks.

One of the most disturbing outgrowths of the global warming controversy over the last twenty or so years has been the increased politicization of science. Of course, this is far from the first time this has occurred, but it may be one of the most important, because we are at a particularly fragile moment in the global economy. Indeed, had it not been for the release of the Climategate emails and documents in November, the recent Copenhagen conference might have succeeded in reallocating billions, even trillions, of dollars, possibly leading to a form of global bankruptcy. Less than two months later, with the so-called science now unraveling on an almost daily basis, the whole thing seems close to insane. How could we have done it?

Well, how could we have done it?

Okay, I’ll take a pass at that – with the caveat that this is a very early narrative of a story that many will tell and examine in the future, undoubtedly in book form. In fact, it deserves several books.

But let’s start with the obvious. Most of us love Mother Earth. It’s a beautiful planet to live on with many extraordinary places and creatures “in’t.” Most of us want to preserve it. And for decades we have been trying to do so – liberals and conservatives in sometimes different ways – via governmental and non-governmental means. To greater or lesser degrees, some of these means worked – or at least improved things. Anyone who lives in Los Angeles, as I do, knows the benefits of air quality legislation. You can actually see the hills and your eyes don’t tear, as they once did, when you walk into the back yard.