With So Many Low-Info American Voters, Did Trump Even Need Putin's Help To Win?

In his column yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote that not only is Trump "the least qualified individual, temperamentally or intellectually, ever installed in the White House," but that "the broader Republican quagmire-- the party’s failure so far to make significant progress toward any of its policy promises-- isn’t just about Mr. Trump’s inadequacies. The whole party, it turns out, has been faking it for years. Its leaders’ rhetoric was empty; they have no idea how to turn their slogans into actual legislation, because they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works."

At this point, then, major Republican initiatives are bogged down for reasons that have nothing to do with the personality flaws of the tweeter in chief, and everything to do with the broader, more fundamental fecklessness of his party...[W]hat we’re witnessing is what happens when a party that gave up hard thinking in favor of empty sloganeering ends up in charge of actual policy. And it’s not a pretty sight.

And, alas, this says quite a lot-- unmentioned by Krugman-- about half our countrymen, the ones who routinely support Republicans, like, for example, the 62,985,106 (45.9%) who voted for Trump in November. And cry all you want about gerrymandered districts, 63,173,815 Americans (49.1%) voted for congressional Republicans while only 61,776,554 (48.0%) voted for congressional Democrats. What's wrong with them? My theory has always been-- going back to my childhood in Brooklyn, where we had virtually no Republicans in my neighborhood-- that they had low IQs.

Tangent alert: Although Brooklyn went for Clinton 595,086 (79.25%) to 133,653 (17.8%), the neighborhoods I grew up in and near where i grew up in-- which are filled with Russian Jewish immigrants now-- went for Trump:

• Ocean Parkway South- Trump- 71.15%
• West Brighton- Trump- 68.77%
• Homecrest- Trump- 66.56%
• Midwood- Trump- 60.62%
• Brighton Beach- Trump- 59.35%
• Lindenwood-Howard Beach- Trump- 58.99%
• Madison- Trump- 56.35%
• Sheepshead Bay- Trump- 50.53%

[I threw Howard Beach into the mix for DWT contributor Helen, who grew up there and who may be as shocked as I am to see what happened to the old neighborhood.]

Last May, writing for New York, Andrew Sullivan noted in a piece entitled Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic-- And Right Now America Is A Breeding Ground For Tyranny, that "Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events."

Those who believed that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism had no chance of ever making it to the White House--myself included-- did indeed miss a dynamic. This week many people are discussing a Columbia Journalism Review study that came out Friday about how the right-wing media ecosystem altered a broader media agenda. It's an explanation of how Trump won that is "less exotic" than Russian hacking, fake news, and Mercer-bankrolled psychological manipulation by Cambridge Analytica-- although it negates none of those symbiotic explanations. The study-- over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day-- "shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton."

Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

...Breitbart became the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed.

...What we find in our data is a network of mutually-reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics,” combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world. “Fake news,” which implies made of whole cloth by politically disinterested parties out to make a buck of Facebook advertising dollars, rather than propaganda and disinformation, is not an adequate term. By repetition, variation, and circulation through many associated sites, the network of sites make their claims familiar to readers, and this fluency with the core narrative gives credence to the incredible.

...Use of disinformation by partisan media sources is neither new nor limited to the right wing, but the insulation of the partisan right-wing media from traditional journalistic media sources, and the vehemence of its attacks on journalism in common cause with a similarly outspoken president, is new and distinctive.

Rebuilding a basis on which Americans can form a shared belief about what is going on is a precondition of democracy, and the most important task confronting the press going forward. Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.

To accomplish this, traditional media needs to reorient, not by developing better viral content and clickbait to compete in the social media environment, but by recognizing that it is operating in a propaganda and disinformation-rich environment. This, not Macedonian teenagers or Facebook, is the real challenge of the coming years. Rising to this challenge could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate.

Where do low IQs fit in here? The study implies that disinformation proliferates on the right because that is exactly what morons-- challenged by the daunting prospect of critical thinking and abstract thought-- are looking for. Going back to Mercer-- the psychotic Long Island billionaire behind Trump, Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart, Media Research Center (and CNSnews)-- there was a project of manipulation that didn't necessarily count on Putin. Normal people-- say someone who gets their news from Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Lawrence O'Donnell-- will instinctively tend to test partisan information against more objective sources. Breitbart readers, Hate Talk Radio listeners and Fox News viewers don’t-- not ever.

In her New Yorker piece a week or two ago, Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds, Elizabeth Kolbert looked at how "new discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason."

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments... If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats-- the human equivalent of the cat around the corner-- it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

...Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

Without Weinergate, would this bunch of pols be any more likely, or more able, to deal with real-world problems?

"Big numbers are thrown around -- Sen. Jon Kyl said Tuesday that Republican agreement to raising the debt ceiling would require $2.5 trillion in spending cuts -- with little inquiry as to how such reductions would affect actual people, future economic growth or our capacity to invest in ourselves. Ah, but trying to answer such questions would distract us from the Weiner story.

"Okay, most of us will always pay attention to sex stories, and apocalyptic fears are usually a form of paranoia. But we’re a superpower with big economic problems. We’re acting like a country that has all the time in the world to dance around our troubles by indulging in ideological fantasies and focusing on the behavioral fantasies of wayward politicians -- who, by the way, keep creating opportunities for distraction."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column today,
"Anthony Weiner and the tweet road to oblivion"

"Obama knows -- and, indeed, has stated as much -- that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future. Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them."

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, in a New Yorker
"Comment" piece this week, "Storms Brewing"

by Ken

It happens every election cycle. Serious people wail about candidates' failure to engage with real issues. Yet the infotainment noozemedia devote roughly 99 percent of their attnetion to mindless sound bites, sensationalism, and horse-race prognostication, leaving any poor sap of a candidate who fantasized about "running on the issues" to face the fact that approximately nobody gives a damn.

Case in point: I don't know how anyone could run a more issues-rich or issues-intelligent campaign than then-Rep. Joe Sestak did last year in the Pennsylvania Senate race, against a candidate who is a pile of pure garbage, a cynical rich-guy opportunist who ran on a platform that said basically: "I'm betting that enough Pennsylvanians are rich opportunists, low-life slimeballs, or garden-variety morons." It turned out to be a winning bet, and I don't suppose we should be surprised.

But I digress. I know I promised last night ("Confidential to Anthony W. of Brooklyn -- you twit!") that "barring unforeseen circumstances" we would be talking tonight about the results of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's online quest for a viable universal cartoon caption -- suitable, for example, for the magazine's much-cherished weekly cartoon-caption contest. I don't know if you could call the developments that have developed since then exactly "unforeseen." Did anyone foresee the circus surrounding Congressman Anthony W. of Brooklyn fading into the night.

True, there is one "unforeseen development." No, I don't mean the tacky disclosure that Mrs. Weiner is pregnant with the couple's first child, which you'd like to think was pretty much their affair. (It was interesting to note, though, that there wasn't any steadfast "little woman" at Anthony W.'s side as he continued blundering his way through his mess.) No, I mean the still-unconfirmed report of the congressman's resignation -- to run for premier of Italy.

BOROWITZ REPORT
June 9, 2011

Weiner Resigns: Will Run for
Prime Minister of Italy

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - Embattled congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) sent shockwaves across the political landscape today, resigning from his seat in Congress and announcing a run for Prime Minister of Italy.



“Today is bittersweet for me,” he said in a resignation speech on the floor of the House of Representatives.  “But it is time to say goodbye to the past and buongiorno to the future.”



Mr. Weiner said that before resigning his seat, he briefly considered running for Prime Minister of Italy while still serving in the House: “I’ve shown that I’m good at multitasking.”



But instead, Mr. Weiner decided to devote himself wholeheartedly to his new campaign: “I’m very excited about this, as all of my followers on Twitter can see.”



Mr. Weiner hit the ground running this morning, blasting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for his use of prostitutes: “As Prime Minister of Italy, I will bring with me a much more fiscally prudent approach.”



According to early Italian polls, Mr. Weiner is appealing mainly to women in the 21 to 22 demographic.



“That’s a group that Berlusconi has totally ignored,” said Italian pollster Donatello Bibbo.  “He considers them too old.”



BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS . . .

"Now, I am always wary of those who do what I’m about to do next: Take a tawdry sex scandal that people read about because we like to read about tawdry sex scandals, and use it to make some larger point."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in the above-cited column

It's easy enough to understand E.J.'s wariness, but I find that the people you usually have to worry about are the ones who aren't wary about such dangers.

What's got E.J. down isn't the Weiner story itself, but its place "at the end of what Thomas Jefferson might call 'a long train of abuses.' You really don wonder what's happening to our democracy and those who serve it."

[T]he Weiner episode marked the culmination of several months during which other sideshows involving outrageous male behavior -- John Ensign and John Edwards come to mind — dominated news coverage at a moment when our country’s future really is on the line. (Bill Clinton’s scandal played out when we were in very good shape, which is one reason he survived.)

Add to this the political media’s tendency to prefer covering personalities that the media created in the first place (Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, above all) to those taking the trouble of running for president and thinking through what they want to say. It’s another case of politicians being reduced (or, maybe, reducing themselves) to celebrities.

I have no particular sympathy for the political views of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or Rick Santorum, but at least the three of them are doing the hard work that democratic politics requires. Thus: Palin’s unusual comments about Paul Revere got far more attention than did Pawlenty’s economic speech this week. It fell to policy bloggers such as The Post’s Ezra Klein to take Pawlenty’s ideas apart. Thus: Palin’s bus trip to the New Hampshire seacoast got at least as much attention as Romney’s announcement of a real, live candidacy.

"But it’s not all the media’s fault," E.J. says,

and this is not just about politicians who conduct themselves badly in their personal lives. Much of what passes for debate consists of irritable ideological gestures. The recent disappointing economic news has not changed the set-piece Washington deficit debate one bit.

Big numbers are thrown around -- Sen. Jon Kyl said Tuesday that Republican agreement to raising the debt ceiling would require $2.5 trillion in spending cuts — with little inquiry as to how such reductions would affect actual people, future economic growth or our capacity to invest in ourselves. Ah, but trying to answer such questions would distract us from the Weiner story.

The cruel fact is that we now have a politics that is almost totally divorced from real-world problems, except insofar as those problems can be mangled beyond recognition by pols who behave as if their brains function at a barely pre-kindergarten level. (The game of figuring out whether they're too stupid to understand or merely too demagogically cynical or opportunistic has long since lost its charm.)

In this week's (June 13) New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert has a timely "Comment" piece called "Storms Brewing," in which she writes:

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.

What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, “weather panic” is the “new normal.” The larger problem is that this “new normal” won’t last.

The evidence continues to accumulate, Kolbert writes, that we're running out of time to get any kind of control over these developments. She points out that Barack Obama 'appointed some of the country's most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded."

Of course, it almost goes without saying at this point that the President’s potential opponents next November are all worse on the issue. Tim Pawlenty, who, as governor of Minnesota, took some commendable actions on climate change, has now renounced them, saying that everyone “has got some clunkers in their record.” Much the same holds for the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, minus the commendable actions. National Journal has summed up the situation this way: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe.”

E. J. Dionne Jr. extrapolates from the "Weiner circus":

Social networking has taken us where human nature always threatesn to go: downward. Do we want to give politicians incentives to limit their thinking to 140 characters?

And he concludes toady's column:

Britney Spears, appropriately enough I suppose, has a catchy song out with the refrain “Keep on dancin’ till the world ends.” Forgive me for wondering whether her song will provide the soundtrack for some future documentary on our national decline if we don’t get very serious, very soon.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Kolbert concludes her "Storms Brewing" piece:

[N]ow that the immediate crisis has passed, the President needs to stop asking the kind of questions that can’t be answered and start addressing those that can. Obama knows—and, indeed, has stated as much—that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future. Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them. It may be beyond our power to control the climate, but we can determine it. This is precisely what we’re doing right now, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to leap back into a Dark Age of anti-science . . .

Next chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee?

by Ken

The other day I mentioned "Elizabeth Kolbert's incredibly depressing 'Comment' piece in the new (Nov. 22) New Yorker, 'Uncomfortable Climate' [complete with a wrong link; this one should be correct], about the criminally ignorant 'F*@k Science' mentality of the Teabagger-blessed band of can-do sociopaths who'll be in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives come January."

Kolbert began her piece with reference to one of the most egregious of the pre-Teabagger Republicans, from whom we're apt to be hearing way too much in the 112th Congress.

Darrell Issa, a Republican representative from California, is one of the richest men in Congress. He made his money selling car alarms, which is interesting, because he has twice been accused of auto theft. (Issa has said that he had a "colorful youth.") As the ranking minority member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he earned a reputation as President Barack Obama's "annoyer-in-chief." Issa told the Times a few months ago, "You can call me a pain. I'll accept that as a compliment."

Now, with the Republicans about to take control of the House, Issa is poised to become the chairman of the Oversight Committee. The post comes with wide-ranging subpoena powers, and Issa has already indicated how he plans to wield them. He is not, he assured a group of Pennsylvania Republicans over the summer, interested in digging around for the sort of information that might embarrass his fellow-zillionaires: "I won't use it to have corporate America live in fear." Instead, he wants to go where he sees the real malfeasance. He wants to investigate climate scientists. At the top of his list are the long-suffering researchers whose e-mails were hacked last year from the computer system of Britain's University of East Anglia. Though their work has been the subject of three separate "Climategate" inquiries -- all of which found that allegations of data manipulation were unfounded -- Issa isn’t satisfied. "We're going to want to have a do-over," he said recently.

Issa’s priorities are, to an astonishing degree, representative of the new Republican House majority. . . .

And she proceeds to serve up some plug-ignorant morsels from soon-to-be Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner ("The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical," he told George Stephanopoulos last year), and two contenders to chair the Energy and Commerce Committee, John Shimkus of Illinois --

At a congressional hearing in 2009, he dismissed the dangers of climate change by quoting Genesis 8:22: "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." He added, "I believe that's the infallible word of God, and that's the way it's going to be for His creation."

and Joe Barton of Texas ("one of the House's top recipients of contributions from the oil-and-gas industry"), who --

argues that CO₂ emissions have nothing to do with climate change, and, in any event, people will just adapt. "When it rains, we find shelter," he has said. "When it's hot, we get shade. When it's cold, we find a warm place to stay." (Barton is perhaps best known for the apology he offered, last June, to the C.E.O. of BP, Tony Hayward, for what he described as a "shakedown" of the company by the Obama Administration.)

"The recent election represents a new low," Kolbert writes -- yes, lower even than the aggressively anti-science Bush II regime. "House Republicans and their Tea Party allies, reject even the idea of concern" on the climate-change issue.

Not content merely to ignore the science, they have decided to go after the scientists. Before the election, congressional Republicans had talked of eliminating the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Why, after all, have a panel on energy independence and global warming if you don't believe in either? Now James Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin, who is likely to become the select committee's chairman, is arguing that it should be preserved. His rationale? The panel provides an ideal platform for harassing the Environmental Protection Agency, which, in the absence of legislative action, is the only body with the power to regulate carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, in today's Washington Post, retired New York State congressman Sherman Boehlert, one of those storied "moderate Republicans" now found mostly in museums and other curatorial situations, sounds an alarm:

Can the party of Reagan accept the science of climate change?

Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn't help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party's line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities.

National Journal reported last month that 19 of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers declared that the science of climate change is either inconclusive or flat-out wrong. Many newly elected Republican House members take that position. It is a stance that defies the findings of our country's National Academy of Sciences, national scientific academies from around the world and 97 percent of the world's climate scientists.

Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world's top scientific academies and scientists are wrong? I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.

I can understand arguments over proposed policy approaches to climate change. I served in Congress for 24 years. I know these are legitimate areas for debate. What I find incomprehensible is the dogged determination by some to discredit distinguished scientists and their findings.

In a trio of reports released in May, the prestigious and nonpartisan National Academy concluded that "a strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems." Our nation's most authoritative and respected scientific body couldn't make it any clearer or more conclusive.

When I was chairman of the House Committee on Science, top scientists from around the world came before our panel. They were experts that Republicans and Democrats alike looked to for scientific insight and understanding on a host of issues. They spoke in probabilities, ranges and concepts - always careful to characterize what was certain, what was suspected and what was speculative. Today, climate scientists - careful as ever in portraying what they know vs. what they suspect - report that the body of scientific evidence supporting the consensus on climate change and its cause is as comprehensive and exhaustive as anything produced by the scientific community.

While many in politics - and not just of my party - refuse to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, leaders of some of our nation's most prominent businesses have taken a different approach. They formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. This was no collection of mom-and-pop shops operated by "tree huggers" sympathetic to any environmental cause but, rather, a step by hard-nosed, profit-driven capitalists. General Electric, Alcoa, Duke Energy, DuPont, Dow Chemical, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler signed on. USCAP, persuaded by scientific facts, called on the president and Congress to act, saying "in our view, the climate change challenge will create more economic opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy."

There is a natural aversion to more government regulation. But that should be included in the debate about how to respond to climate change, not as an excuse to deny the problem's existence. The current practice of disparaging the science and the scientists only clouds our understanding and delays a solution. The record flooding, droughts and extreme weather in this country and others are consistent with patterns that scientists predicted for years. They are an ominous harbinger.

The new Congress should have a policy debate to address facts rather than a debate featuring unsubstantiated attacks on science. We shouldn't stand by while the reputations of scientists are dragged through the mud in order to win a political argument. And no member of any party should look the other way when the basic operating parameters of scientific inquiry - the need to question, express doubt, replicate research and encourage curiosity - are exploited for the sake of political expediency. My fellow Republicans should understand that wholesale, ideologically based or special-interest-driven rejection of science is bad policy. And that in the long run, it's also bad politics.

What is happening to the party of Ronald Reagan? He embraced scientific understanding of the environment and pollution and was proud of his role in helping to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. That was smart policy and smart politics. Most important, unlike many who profess to be his followers, Reagan didn't deny the existence of global environmental problems but instead found ways to address them.

The National Academy reports concluded that "scientific evidence that the Earth is warming is now overwhelming." Party affiliation does not change that fact.

The writer, a Republican, represented New York's 24th District in Congress from 1983 to 2007. He is a special adviser to the Project on Climate Science.

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