With Ryan out of the race, I’m fully prepared to endorse this ticket for the sheer entertainment value of their joint townhalls during the campaign. “First question: Global warming — real or fake?” Total implosion.
At NRO, Kevin Williamson wonders why the media cares what Huntsman’s position on climate change is. Which is to say, he doesn’t wonder at all:
Progressives like to cloak their policy preferences in the mantle of science, but they do not in fact give a fig about science, which for them is only a vehicle to be ridden to the precise extent that it is convenient. This is why they will ask what makes Rick Perry qualified to disagree with the scientific establishment, but never ask the equally relevant question of what makes Jon Huntsman qualified to agree with it. So long as they are getting the policies they want, they don’t care. If you want to see how dedicated a progressive is to dispassionate science, spend two minutes talking about the heritability of intelligence. You’ll be up to your neck in witchcraft and superstition and evasion in no time at all. (If you want to test a progressive’s faith in rigorous scholarship more broadly, ask him about gains from trade and comparative advantage, realities that are as solid as anything social science has to offer.)
Perry is making an error by approaching these questions as though they were scientific disputes and not political ones. The real question about global warming isn’t whether one computer simulation or another is the better indicator of what our climate will be like a century hence, it is whether such policies as envisioned by the environmentalist-anti-capitalist green coalition are wise. They are not. Evolution is a public question not because politicians have anything intelligent to say about the science, but because the question provides a handy cudgel to those who wish to beat the Judeo-Christian moral tradition into submission in the service of managerial progressivism. Perry should talk about that, not about alleged “gaps” in the scientific evidence, about which neither he nor his questioners nor the great majority of his critics nor the great majority of his supporters knows the first thing.
A further question from my pal Karol Markowicz. Given that 74 percent of Democrats believe either that God has guided human evolution or that God created man in his current form within the past 10,000 years, how come liberal icons are never made to tease out their theories of origin?
The crazy thing here isn’t that people will have different beliefs about different things, it’s that the media will insist on pushing these issues to the forefront of the presidential race despite it not mattering one iota. What difference does it make if the president thinks the world was created in 7 days or if he thinks we descended from apes? And, as Houston Chronicle blogger Kathleen McKinley tweeted, why is it that it’s only Republican candidates who have this question asked of them again and again. She added “Has a reporter ever asked Obama if he believe in evolution? And then followed up with saying ” Don’t you believe God created the earth?””
Much was made of Barack Obama’s Christian faith during the 2008 election, he spoke of it often and it was used to counter the mistaken belief that he was a Muslim. Why then, is he never challenged to reconcile how he can be such a devout Christian yet not follow so much of the religion? Why is he never asked how he can be pro-choice when his faith clearly dictates the pro-life position? Why does he not receive the same challenges to his faith as the GOP candidates?
Here’s a better question: If Obama said he believes in evolution that’s “guided” by God, which is the safe answer politically, rather than Darwinian evolution, would anyone buy it? No one takes him at face value on his “opposition” to gay marriage, for instance, because (a) he’s a doctrinaire liberal and everyone knows what doctrinaire liberalism says about that issue, and (b) he’s not a guy who risks political capital on hot-button cultural issues unless he absolutely has to. The evolution question would fall into the same box, but maybe Tapper or someone will toss it out there at him at some point just to get him on the record. It’ll be amusing, if not enlightening.
Here’s Huntsman. Needless to say, his declaration that “if you love this country, you serve this country” is aimed squarely at his role as ambassador to Obama. Well played of him to use this goofy hypothetical involving Bachmann to make that point.
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