In which I pick on another Ryun

Drew Ryun, twin brother of equally clueless Ned Ryun, discusses:

the feeling that a vast majority of Americans share. The Democrats are not good on national defense.

Hmmm. "Next, please tell me if you think the Republican Party or the DEMOCRATIC Party could do a better job in each of the following areas:

Making wise decisions about foreign policy: R=40%, D=45%.
Making wise decisions about what to do in Iraq: R=37%, D=47%

This isn't new. Gallup found Democrats taking the lead on national security issues between 2006 and 2007, while Rasmussen found in early 2006 that more Americans trusted Congressional Democrats than President Bush on national security.

Of course, this is all helped by the fact that, not only were many Democrats right about Iraq to begin with, Republicans seem still to think that invading Iraq was meritorious, rather than meretricious.

SPECIAL BONUS RYUN MOCKERY:

Ned Ryun asks: "Global Warming ... or global cooling?" To which I answer: Global warming.

But then I read on and find:

If you look at the cyclical nature of the warming and cooling trends, I tend to think that we’re headed towards a cooling trend.

That might be true in the southern hemisphere, where they are approaching the austral winter. This is explained by the tilt of the earth, which places the southern hemisphere at a more oblique angle to the sun. Here in the north, the trend is rather different, as noted by anyone who regularly walks outside, or has a window. Perhaps Ned wasn't thinking of seasonal cycles. He might have meant multi-decadal cycles of some sort, but then he'd have to be blind or ignorant.

I'll give Ned the benefit of the doubt and assume he wasn't thinking of events on the scale of ice ages, since there is a consensus that we are at the tail-end of an interglacial, and in a few thousand years, that might mean something some day, depending on the Milankovitch cycles. It doesn't mean anything today, when we are seeing faster temperature change than at any other period in the geological record, driven by an unprecedented influx of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.