In the right-wing tabloid New York Post, movie critic Kyle Smith has a review of An Inconvenient Truth that virtually defies mockery. It almost invites sympathy.
Right off the bat, there’s this:
But there is wide disagreement about whether humans are causing global warming (climate change preceded the invention of the Escalade) and about whether we should be worried about the trends.
Um, no there isn’t.
His implication that he is our only hope … is ridiculous.
What implication? What possible fever dream did Smith pull this from?
For jaw-dropping ignorance, this is probably the coup de grace:
Global warming hasn’t noticed that we got the lead out of our gasoline or that Stage One smog days in Los Angeles fell from 121 in 1977 to zero in 2004. All regulations and taxes to date have done nothing. Does this hint that pollution isn’t the cause?
First of all, regulations and taxes are the reason smog days fell in Los Angeles. Second of all, who the %&$! ever said smog causes global warming? Third of all … oh, screw it.
This is the funniest bit:
He assesses the tradeoff between the economy and the environment with the kind of buffoonery you’d expect in a Marxist comic book, displaying a cartoon of a scale with Earth on one side and bars of gold on the other.
Gore, you may recall, says that there is no tradeoff between the economy and the environment. The cartoon — which Gore is using to mock that notion — was pulled from a Bush administration presentation. It is the administration’s assessment that is buffoonery. You really stepped on a rake there, Kyle.
How about this:
Why doesn’t he get specific and replace the "gold bar" side of the scale with, say, a $50,000 tax on SUVs? The ensuing destruction of the car business would hurt blue-collar workers, not the rich.
A tax on SUVs would destroy the car business? Aren’t the carmakers that don’t focus on SUVs dominating the car business? Wait, and if the car business were destroyed, no rich people would be hurt? Don’t rich people own the car business? And wait, isn’t the point to slow global warming, not hurt the rich?
Gore says that America, alone, is the problem.
[Sound of my finger going up and down on my lips making that burbblety sound]
Here’s a doozie:
"We have to think differently about war," he says, referring to environmental effects of weapons. "We can’t just mindlessly continue the patterns of the past." It’s a chilling statement: Even when bombs are flying, Gore promises to measure CO2 first.
Let’s see: Gore wasn’t "referring to the environmental effects of weapons." He was making a philosophical point: that more powerful technologies should make us think differently about how we behave. Somehow, somewhere, perhaps up his own rear, Smith found some kind of implication that Gore is … a traitor? Too concerned with nature to drop nukes on people? Something? I honestly can’t even tell.
And finally:
The final shot of Gore shows him bravely silhouetted against the cosmos, a lone figure tenderly surveying the firmament.
No. The final shot of Gore does not show him silhouetted against the cosmos. That’s a hurricane, dumbass.
You may think it’s a waste of time taking this column apart. But even though nearly every sentence is wrong, it’s worth examining. This is the far-right id. This is what’s floating around the heads of College Republicans. There’s no attempt to address the science presented in the movie, no indication of worrying, caring, or even engaging at all with the issue. There’s just pure, reptile-brain partisan warfare, an attempt to take a perceived ideological enemy down a peg.
Li’l Kyle is obviously a media browshirt who got pushed out of the VRWC nest too early, before he was ready to pontificate without training wheels (to mix metaphors). But he’s not an anomaly. You want to know why global warming is a partisan issue? Because there are thousands and thousands of Kyles out there.
