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David Frum Tweets: ‘Horrible Possibility: If The Geeks Are Right About Ohio, Might They Also Be Right About Climate?’
First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.
The best conservative tweet of election night may belong to David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush:
Political junkies may know that the right-wing denial of data extended to the countless pre-election polls showing the President stubbornly retaining a lead in the decisive swing state of Ohio.
Heck, there’s even a website, UnskewedPolls.com, that “fixed” the polls conservatives didn’t like by using a different — which is to say, more Republican — electorate model. Think of it as a WattsUpWithThatPoll — a website where cherry-picking and phony analysis allowed readers to exist in a parallel universe to our own, in this case one where the voting public demographically resembled the electorate of the 1980s.
Reality intruded last night, as it inevitably does when one ignores basic arithmetic, statistical analysis, and inexorable demographic trends — or basic physics, for that matter.
Frum is a card-carrying conservative — he coined the phrase “axis of evil.” And his ironic tweet foreshadows an even more painful reality that will eventually intrude on those currently duped by the professional climate science deniers. But instead of this being “Nate Silver was right about Ohio” it’s gonna be “Al Gore was right about climate change.”
Unfortunately, climate denial is far more consequential than polling denial. And as amusing as Frum’s tweet is, it is of a kind with David Brooks’ line in a 2005 piece on conservative intellectual exhaustion, “Running Out of Steam”:
Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this).
The tragedy is that seven years later, that remains the best-kept secret in DC.
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