The best thing about being a liberal is the license to write idiotic things, pretend they’re scientific, and receive praise from you fellow liberals who accept your nonsense as settled science.
Examples abound; just look at the mindless babblings of James Hansen and Al Gore. One a scientist, one a mediocre reporter.
Edward McClelland writing on Salon.com recently wasted a couple of hours on an essay the claims air conditioning causes people to vote Republican. (No, it’s not clever and there’s no “aha” moment anywhere. Just his speculation dressed up as settled science.)
His thesis: Air conditioning induced a population migration from cooler states that traditionally vote Democrat to warmer states that traditionally vote Republican. This postulation can be logically reduced to say, “Pollitical affiliation is function of geography.”
Stupid.
Since science means nothing to liberals, I can disprove his thesis with a single example. Me.
A life-long conservative, I spent 7 years stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. But in 1992, the Navy transferred me to Groton, Connecticut, where my family and I lived in an un-air conditioned Navy duplex. By Mr. McClelland’s logic, the combination of geographical location and lack of AC should have turned me into an Al Franken’s-ass-kissing, AGW freaking, Al Qaeda-loving, ACLU-donating, corporate-bashing lefty class basher.
Instead, I wrote The Conservative Manifesto, started my own corporation, left the Navy, helped the GOP take back the House and Senate, moved back to St. Louis, and worked my ass off for George W. Bush in 2000.
I could have erred in my reduction of McClelland’s thesis. Perhaps the mere presence of air conditioning, regardless of geography, causes Republicanism. I can still prove him wrong, by liberal standards: my air conditioning went out today.
If McClelland’s thesis hold water, then I should have driven to Springfield, Illinois, to fawn over the messiah and his Peter as they launched that class war in which Biden all but promised to personally murder every son-of-a-bitch who makes more than $100,000 a year–unless the wage earner is a government employee or union member.
But I didn’t. Instead, I sweated out this blog entry. Even now, a tenacious dribble of sweat dangles dangerously from the tip of my nose above the touchpad of my laptop.
Since Mr. McClelland deserves an alternative explanation for America’s mild turn to starboard over the past 30 years, I’ll leave him with this: From FDR to Carter, Americans gave liberals almost half a century to fix all the problems liberalism promised to cure–poverty, hatred, war, disease, ignorance, racism. After 46 years, most of those problems had gotten worse. In the process, America lost her groove. Ronald Reagan offered to restore both balance and pride to the greatest nation that ever graced the earth.