I’m just enough of a dummy that when I glanced at this headline, I thought she meant the researchers should be prosecuted. (Which isn’t unthinkable: George Monbiot noted last week that deleting material subject to a British FOIA inquiry is potentially criminal.) That’s what I get for even momentarily giving a hack like Boxer the benefit of the doubt.

No, of course she means the hackers should be prosecuted for illegally procuring evidence of malfeasance regarding an urgent, trillion-dollar matter of international public policy. Ace has been goofing on the shamelessness of this tactic since last week — leaks that help the left are always about the information obtained, leaks that hurt the left are always about the leak’s illegality — but it’s amazing to see someone as prominent as Boxer stoop to it. She could have simply taken the Jon Stewart route and said no, global warming isn’t in question, but yes, this is a scandalous betrayal of public trust. Doing so would have only helped her side, proving that she’s sincerely interested in the integrity of the science and not prone to the same squirrelly eagerness to ignore unhelpful information as the East Anglia boys. But she’s too stupid or corrupt to figure that out, so in the end the fake newsman has more credibility than a real senator.

Exit quotation via Daniel Henninger: “Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.”