Thoughts from Kansas

The Disco. 'Tute is displeased. Or perhaps not. They love attention, especially in a venue like the New York Times. But they hate having attention drawn to their agenda or the details of what they advocate. Thus, we get…

Shorter Disco.:

Yes we think AGW and evolution are bogus, but how dare people draw attention to our views!

Disco had started calling for a wahmbulance even before yesterday's front-page-above-the-fold article about efforts to link global warming with creationism. Then it got published, and the calls to whine-one-one started rolling in. "Oh my ZOMG," the pearl-clutching Seattleites wrote, "finally someone noticed that we dislike evolution and global warming with nearly equal passion, but why must they write stories about our efforts to link the two in state and local policies?"

Joining the cries from Disco. communication's staffer Rob Crowther and John West – the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture's head – newly returned fellow Jay Richards and Disco. club owner Bruce Chapman have weighed in. Chapman opens his post by writing:

Left wing ideology, the pursuit of government grants and the stifling of scientific dissent work together to hobble progress, reduce freedom and raise costs. Slowly people are going to figure it out. Support the right to scientific dissent, therefore, or give another weapon to Leviathan.

Unintentional assistance comes our way today from The New York Times.

And so forth. Indeed, to Chapman's eyes, the error the Times makes is not in linking denial of evolution and of global warming, but in not going further:

you can add to these two issues some other controversies in science, where a left wing elite, using the enormous financial resources and regulatory power of government, such as the EPA, the NIH and the National Science Foundations, seeks to suppress dissent from the reigning ideology. … opponents of embryonic stem cell research, as our Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith has written, often are either ignored or denigrated in academia and government. … the supposed scientific case for the philosophic idea that animals have "rights", sometimes rights superior to those of certain human beings (e.g., elderly people in comas, unborn children).…

The problem, therefore, is not (as the Times imagines) that some conservatives have noted such linkages, but that so many other conservatives, neo-conservatives and moderates are unable to connect the dots.

But then comes Richards at the blog of the AEI, which can be shortered:

(Image via).

Richards writes:

when I read anything on the environment in the New York Times, I try to keep a couple of deconstructionist qualifiers running in the back of my head: “This is what the New York Times wants me to believe about the issue” and “What are they trying to accomplish with this piece?”

After some dawdling, Richards lays out several claimed similarities between evolution and global warming, and several differences, and decries the Times attempt at linking the two. The goal, he insists is to "Divide and conquer skeptics of global warming orthodoxy and Darwinism, by painting the latter as ignorant religious zealots, in hopes of starting a fight among conservatives." Which sounds like exactly Richards' boss's desire in attacking his conservative pals who refuse to "connect the dots."

Time to prep a carpage unit! Mass grievances en route.