Posts Tagged ‘Rush Limbaugh’
Limbaugh tells Newt Gingrich to remove chapter on climate change from book – Newt says, “Yes, boss!”
A US climate scientist at the centre of a row over Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s stance on climate change has spoken out for the first time, condemning the polarisation of the issue.
Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, had written a chapter for Gingrich’s upcoming book of essays on the environment. The chapter was aimed at climate sceptics, and those who fear it will cost too much to deal with climate change, but it was ditched by the presidential candidate after the book came under attack by rightwing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Gingrich, desperate to shore up his conservative credentials, said of the chapter at a recent campaign event: “That’s not going to be in the book. We didn’t know that they were doing that and we told them to kill it.”
In her first extensive comment on the matter, Hayhoe told the Guardian she condemned the polarisation of a crucial global concern. “I really, really deplore the politicisation and polarisation of this issue. There are these increasingly unprincipled attempts to polarise the science when the science is fact – like the sky is blue, the grass is green and the temperature of our planet is increasing.”
The decision to drop her contribution arrived as a complete shock to Hayhoe, who was told in a 7 December email that her chapter had been accepted without major changes. Days later, the chapter was on the scrap heap…
Any Republicans left out there? Or only Rushicans?
We asked all the Republican officials here in Washington. There are hundreds of them, for just one of them to step forward and say that he or she disagrees with Rush on anything. Anything.
We got this idea when a U.S. congressman from Georgia had to tip-toe backward on something he’d said. He’d actually dared to defend the Republican leadership against Rush’s charges. But not for long. After a few hours of withering nervousness, the Congressman decided that it was the better part of valor to tell Rush that he was sorry for what he’d done.
How can this happen in a democracy?
But listen up. It continued like this.
I thought for sure it might stop, this kow-towing to the radio man down in Florida, when Rush went so far as to back BP in the oil mess. He went out there and took “BP’s” side, attacking the President for being so unpleasant with the big oil company by getting it to set aside $20 billion for the people whose lives have been sunk by the oil spill.
Well, not even that got not a single congressperson to step up and say, “this is where I get off, where I cut Limbaugh loose.”
When we had the congressman from Louisiana on, not even “he” would side with his party’s leadership and take on Rush. While saying Rush didn’t speak for him, that he spoke for himself, he still would not complete the thought and say, darn it, Rush is wrong, couldn’t do it.
Perhaps he “can’t” do it. Maybe no Republican can do it, the way things are today.
We continue to look for that lonely Republican to stand up against big, bad BP and win one for the folks who are really getting messed with, the folks the chairman of BP calls the “small people.”
I happened to see this segment – usually unlikely because Matthews reminds me of nothing more than the traditional four-flusher big city pol he worked for, Tip O’Neil.
He made an interesting point as an aside. The Congressional Republicans, the RNC big dogs control the pursestrings; but, they have no clout with the teabaggers, NRA-types and the bible-thumping malcontents who seem to be all that’s left of rank-and-file membership in the Republican Party.
The declassé brigade fear RINOs as much as they do Black People, Hispanics, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. They don’t even know the names of Republicans in Congress from more than two states away. They do listen to Glen Beck and Rush, O’Reilly and the rest of the 19th Century leeches sucking an income out of the airwaves of America. That really is who they obey.
The Republican Party is just another radio church, after all.
