Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

An over the top, self-admitted drug abuser who engages in perpetual name calling rather than policy analysis laid claim to intellectual leadership of what used to be called the party of Lincoln without so much as a whimper, much less a protest, from the ranks of the Republican Party hierarchy.

The aforementioned contretemps prompted many political analysts to conclude that the Republicans had degenerated into a far right, insulated pressure group with an accent on insults and opposition to any form of constructive change with no concern about developing policy.

This charge and the concern registered within it was recently substantiated by comments from Sarah Palin on global warming.  As Republican vice presidential nominee Palin and her supporters alleged that gentle interviewer Katie Couric had engaged in ambush journalism by asking her which newspapers she read, to which she had no answer.  

Could she not have thought of her own Alaskan newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, or perhaps the New York Times?

The same Palin who could not think of one newspaper she read issued an instant challenge to a unified contingent of some of the world's most brilliant minds, some 47 Nobel Prize science winners along with scores of others in the international scientific community.  

A few e-mails from East Anglia University that involved more spleen venting than intellectual substance were presented by Palin and her allies as refutation of Al Gore and others pleading the case for immediate action in global warming policy before it is too late.  

Demagogues took the Palin critique and ran with it.  At a recent Gore book signing one critic of the angry tea bagger variety was seen being escorted out of the store after shrieking that the former vice president was a proven fraud.

As Gore and other rational analysts have pointed out, the melting Arctic polar ice caps provide proof positive of ongoing global warming.  A report on the December 15 edition of PBS' Jim Lehrer News Hour revealed more such evidence with melting ice caps in Nepal's Himalayan mountains.

Needless to say, the "scholars" of the Palin community, including Republican titular head Limbaugh, who has contended for years that global warming is a made up scare tactic of far left political extremists, will never consider melting ice cap evidence.

That is what the school of Palin-Limbaugh-Fox adherents love, accepting what they wish without devoting a scant second to factual analysis.  These are the adherents that dominate the current Republican Party.