Friday rant: Hot mess edition
By Tom Toles
And there was Mitt Romney earlier this week campaigning in coal country and ridiculing Obama’s support of wind power. Holy soot. If that were a movie, you’d sit there thinking the writers had played too obviously to villanous stereotype. But no, the US Reality Show outdoes fiction. Only in America can a politician pretend that you don’t even have to consider discussing or acknowleging climate change, even with half the country burning up, much of it literally. And your media plays right along. And so do you.
Did the TV reporter covering Mitt mention that climate change MIGHT have some bearing on the debate between coal and renewables? Of course not, because the media has been cowed into the cozy-safe zone of acting as if the science is all up in the air with the carbon. Do reporters know that in fact the science is essentially settled? Yes. Do their editors? Also yes. But hey, the easy way out is, well, EASIER! Who wants to poke a stick into the right-wing noise machine? And who’s going to call them on it? Oh, there’s that one cartoonist/blogger who seems to care about it. Yawn. Take a chill pill, Tommy!
It amazes that people think that climate change is the responsibility of “environmentalists.” And that you can report stories that bear directly on it without so much as a MENTION. Which planet do these reporters live on? Which planet do YOU live on? And so over to you, voters. If you don’t want to live in a stupid, frying country, start acting like it. The forests are burning. The houses are burning. The corn is shriveling. The brains are shriveling. Or take your chill pill and see how cool that makes things.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-hot-mess-edition/2012/08/16/9d775928-e7c6-11e1-a3d2-2a05679928ef_blog.html