John Dickerson in Slate notes that when his Iraq strategy was questioned in a press conference, the Prez resorted to threatening the children of reporters with al-Qaida:
"They are a threat to your children, David," he said to NBC’s David Gregory . It’s an understandable instinct [writes Dickerson]. To persuade, we try to appeal to common experience. Policy debates can get abstract. Mention someone’s children, though, and they get concrete fast. The president found this such a useful tool that he used it a second time in the same press conference. "I would hope our world hasn’t become so cynical that they don’t take the threats of al-Qaida seriously, because they’re real, and it’s a danger to the American people," he said in response to a question about the war from Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times. "It’s a danger to your children, Jim."
Pardon my obviousness, but if the Prez can sic Osama bin Laden on our children, couldn’t the Washington press corps ask him how he can justify doing nothing about global warming?
As James Lovelock points out in "The Revenge of Gaia:"
Past and present atmospheric pollution with carbon dioxide and methane is similar to the natural release of these gases fifty-five million years ago, when comparable quantities of carbon entered the atmopshere. Then the temperature rose about 8 degrees Centrigrade in the temperate northern regions and 5C in the tropics; the consequences of this heating lasted 200,000 years.
Lovelock foresees this happening within fifty years, baring huge changes made starting now. He’s a little ahead of the climatological consensus, but only by two or three decades, and he’s known for his ability to see the work of life on the planet as a whole.
Give me a choice between a few thousand religious fanatics in robes who want to attack the symbols of our dominance, and an atmosphere shifting to a new mode likely to doom our way of life in these United States, and I’ll take the terrorists. Call me an environmental whacko, but I kinda like our climate as it is.
Kit Stolz 