Everyone who knows anything about the scientific case for global warming knows that, from the start, the theory predicted extreme weather conditions — of all kinds — as Earth adjusts to warming. This year’s Mid-Atlantic snow doesn’t disprove the predictions. It supports them.
If you don’t know anything about what you don’t want to believe in anyway, you can taunt climate-change science. You can also roast pig iron and expect to eat pork chops. The scientific illiteracy of American show-offs is as old as medicine shows.
More troubling are the different histories being written for a period in which we are still living, what some economists capitalize as the Great Recession.
Something happened. In his memoir, “On the Brink,” then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recalls the stress-filled day and sleepless night in the fall of 2008 when he learned that Lehman Brothers would not be saved and that the world’s economy was in deep trouble. “It would take years to dig ourselves out from under such a disaster,” he thought.
Little more than a year later, the bankers who brought it on are asking, “What disaster?” They have resumed their follies and sent lobbyists to Capitol Hill to argue that they don’t need to be regulated.
What universe is that coming from?
The congressional oversight panel watching banks and bailouts warns that $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans is under water. Store and office space is headed the way of housing, in which people are still losing their homes every day. The White House and the Congressional Budget Office both project an unemployment rate around 10 percent for all of 2010.
And, by the way, European central bankers are still enduring endless days and sleepless nights.
In that universe, economic activity is becalmed in the horse latitudes of debt. With no other money moving, everyone who still has a job has it in part because of the federal stimulus.
The proof is the inflation rate. If the engines of capitalism were making money to chase goods and services, government stimulus money would have given us a consumer price index as bad as every other indicator.
A plaster yard troll can understand that. But not, obviously, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-West Chester, who rattles on about “a stimulus that didn’t create any jobs.”
Rep. Boehner floats in orbit, not quite touching down in a huge universe where everything was peachy until Jan. 20, 2009, when Barack Obama began to take over everything to fulfill his Marxist-socialist plan to be the worst president in U.S. history.
Something bigger happened, though. Defending his lunge to the left, the bank bailout, President Bush the Younger said his instincts were against it, but “the markets are not functioning properly.”
In the universe where accurate records are kept, markets still aren’t humming. The malfunction began before Mr. Obama.
It turns out that Mr. Obama’s opponent was also a socialist in some universe. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an admirer of Barry Goldwater, will be challenged from the right in his state’s Republican primary.
You may believe that Sen. McCain is a lefty. You may believe that there never was a recession. Or you may believe that whatever it was, it’s over. It seems to depend on how many moons shine down on where you live.
Tom Blackburn is a former member of The Palm Beach
(Fla.)
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oard. E-mail: tom
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