How Truth Is Not

1. Global Warming:

It snowed, but they still came. A heavy snowfall blanketed a global warming protest outside the State House in Annapolis this morning, but it did not dampen the shouts of about 400 activists who urged lawmakers to pass the nation's toughest greenhouse gas control law.

As supporters waved signs, chanted and banged drums, 18 legislators walked down a symbolic green carpet to sign up as co-sporsors to a bill that would mandate that all businesses in Maryland cut emissions of global warming pollution by 25 percent by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050.

Plus, Greenland is attacked by ice:

While the rest of Europe is debating the prospects of global warming during an unseasonably mild winter, a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland.

On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade.

2. Republicans Hate More:

Actually, no. The Hatemongers are Liberal:

The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, "The right wing, that is not where America's at . . . It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots."

What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity.

So, statistically, who hates more?

Why, of course, as readers to my blog know, that would be The Left:

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

Oh shit! Once again, the Right deals with FACTS and The Left deals with ee-mo-shuns.

As one of my friends is frequently wont to say: "I hate it when logic, facts, common sense and proportion get in the way of a good fucked-up decision."

Don't they, though?

BZ