News item: Newt Gingrich thinks John Kerry should resign after telling a conference in Indonesia on Sunday that global warming is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”
“The most direction reaction” to the comment, Gingrich tweeted, is that Kerry, the Secretary of State, is “completely out of touch with reality.”
Being out of touch with reality is a subject that Gingrich, the architect of the first Republican takeover of the House, who then pissed away his power base chasing after President Bill Clinton and shutting the government down over a pique related to being forced to sit on the back of Air Force One on an international trip, should know well.
But enough about CNN’s pathetic effort to rediscover relevance by hiring Gingrich to co-host a revival of its once-seminal program “Crossfire.”
Let’s take Gingrich at his word. Global warming isn’t as big an issue as Russian and North Korean nukes. Write that one down. It pales in comparison to terrorism. Etch that one in stone.
What are we missing here?
Hmmm. Maybe the fact that no group of humans possessing nuclear weapons can shoot them at another if there isn’t a planet for us to continue living on.
Same for terrorists. Terrorists are terrifying, no doubt, but they’re not nearly as much so if earth is uninhabitable for human life.
The war on terror is an interesting one anyway. How do we eliminate a tactic? It’s like declaring war on … war. War causes a lot more death and destruction than terrorism. Terrorism is something you do when you’re at war. War is the big thing that we need to be getting rid of, but you never hear anybody declaring war on war.
We declare wars on poverty, on illiteracy, teen pregnancy, each other, but never on war itself.
This war on terror will go on forever. So will the effort to keep nukes out of everybody’s hands but … ours. Think about that one. We’ve spent much of the past 50 years trying to get rid of nukes in Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, but we’re not offering ours up, are we?
Funny how the same people pushing the nuclear-proliferation angle internationally go on and on about how you’ll have to take their right to own personal firearms from their cold dead hands. So it’s OK for us to have more guns in our hands than the rest of the world has combined, and of course we have more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined, many times over, but when it comes to everybody else? Hell, no!
So that’s it for Gingrich and his ilk. Now to Kerry, and this quibble with what he said on Sunday. The thrust of his speech was that developing nations need to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, even as the developed world churns out billows of smoke like there was no tomorrow.
Dig deep into that one. We’ve been polluting the atmosphere for a couple of hundred years now, and as a result, we’re filthy rich, literally in both cases. But you guys, you poor countries, sorry, but we can’t let you do what we did to get rich, because we way, way overdid it, and, well, too late, but you have to make your money somehow else.
Talk about paternalistic. If I’m the average third-world leader type in that audience, I’m live-tweeting how Kerry is out of touch with reality saying that the industrial revolution needs to come to an end for the sake of the first world being able to enjoy clean air and wealth that not even God himself could have imagined for his creation.
But I’m not a third-world leader type. Fortunately for me, I was born in the West, and even growing up in Western poverty had access to education that allowed me to lift myself up to a pretty solid life, by all accounts, including those involving banks.
I don’t own a gun, don’t support terrorists, have no idea how nuclear weapons work, and wish that global warming would make it stop snowing all the damn time.
And I think Newt Gingrich is absolutely full of it, and that John Kerry isn’t far behind.
Now back to your favorite reality TV show, already in progress.