Or maybe just a moron. When Ed Robinson used his newspaper column to call for the election of a “really smart” president for a change (a big change) from the current administration, the Bush apologists grabbed their crayons and scrawled tightly reasoned defenses of their beloved president. The results did not exactly raise the level of discourse.From the June 6, 2007, Letters to the Bee:
Let's give Leolin a little credit here. This letter is a masterpiece of compression, much like the wonders wrought by a trash compactor. Let's tick off the highlights:
Liberals are dumb, Bush isn't
Re “Wanted: A really smart U.S. president,” commentary, June 2: Once again the mindless liberal sells short everyone he hates. If the president is a Republican, then he is therefore dumb. That was their rap on President Reagan and history has proved who the dunce really was. Can you say Jimmy Carter?
To name Al “I can't count the vote” Bore our intellectual savior is laughable. After inventing the Internet, what has he done? Oh, he made a fantasy film. Good old Al, who uses 1,000 times more carbon-based fuels than the rest of us.
Mr. Brilliant missed that the latest two big reports on “warming” were about Mars and Neptune. Now there actually is consensus that the sun has caused this to occur. But Earth warming, that would be your fault. He forgot to notice that there were Norsemen in Greenland farming from 1100 to 1350 A.D., until the Earth cooled for 500 years and covered it with ice. He also didn't notice the report on the 1,000-year-old mine in the Swiss Alps that was uncovered when the glacier receded. The Earth cools, then it heats up.
—Leolin Brush, El Dorado Hills
- Eek! The media is liberal!
- Jimmy Carter was a dummy!
- Smarty-pants Al Gore deserves to have his name misspelled!
- Gore's house is way bigger than mine!
- I don't believe in global warming, so neener neener!
- The planets are getting hotter!
- Temperatures change!
The schoolyard bully attack on Gore is typical of today's GOP. Can't count the votes? He got half a million more than Bush. He almost certainly got more than Bush did in Florida, too, but it was too inconvenient to do a proper recount. Lucky for Bush there was a Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Oh, and Gore never did claim to have invented the Internet. This is a robust GOP talking point that decent and sensible people should have seen through a long time ago, but idiots keep repeating it.
Gore's house is not only large (he is, after all, a prosperous man—a condition no Republican should disdain), it is an office complex. He and his wife have offices and staff as part of their home. Restrictive state laws have prevented him from installing as many energy-saving technologies as he wanted, but those problems are being addressed.
It is especially funny to find a Bush apologist claiming that there is a scientific “consensus” that solar warming is responsible for earth's climate change. The actual consensus is that human generation of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, is a major component of the cause of rising temperatures. I suspect, however, the Leolin is not a scientist, but rather just someone who repeats Republican talking points. Lots of Republican talking points.
Fortunately, not everyone is foolish enough to feel that our foolish president is ideally representing them. From the same letters column we have this:
That's telling them, Alvin! At last, a voice of reason.
Time to smarten up, electorate
My compliments to Eugene Robinson for his commentary, "Wanted: A really smart U.S. president." I hope it makes a difference. I hope people have read it and wise up to that to which they ought to be responding. I want an electorate that wants what Robinson and I want.
Even if he has some values differing from mine, I want a president who would be highly unlikely to screw things up as badly as this administration has done. I want an electorate that realizes that, although science doesn't have all the answers, it's the best we have at providing the facts to be used toward arriving upon our wisest course of action. I want an electorate that realizes that science is, through time, progressing toward a better comprehension of our world, both physical and sociological, and providing answers. I want an electorate that realizes that the answers which science provides have practical utility in fields such as medicine, transportation, communication, economics, foreign relations, etc.
—Alvin Ludtke, Rancho Cordova
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