October 19, 2010

At PolitiFactWisc, where false means true

This morning's key premises and conclusion:
Ron Johnson says Russ Feingold supported stimulus plan that allowed [a Texas] company to create 3,000 jobs in China.
Note the past tense, indicating the jobs have already been created.

Then PolitiFactWisc itself states:
The Texas project has not applied for or received any stimulus funding to date, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Therefore, pronounces PolitiFactWisc:
We rate Johnson’s claim Barely True.
So Johnson's claim that some event took place is false, as confirmed by PolitiFactWisc, which nonetheless "rates" Johnson's claim true.

Whatever.

The point is this: China is beating the U.S. in clean energy engineering and manufacturing precisely because of people like Ron Johnson, who insist on denying the harmful effects of burning ever-increasing quantities of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere.

Yet Ron Johnson, who has no formal training whatsoever in the physical sciences, actually claimed that excess carbon dioxide so produced "gets sucked down by trees and helps the trees grow."

In other words, Ron Johnson would do nothing to address the environmental prognosis, which is supported by mountains of empirical evidence, simply because he doesn't "believe" it.

And now, on top of all that, Ron Johnson is going to complain in a political ad that it might be less costly for U.S. manufacturers just now getting in the clean energy racket to procure sub-components from offshore, where they have already been designed and built thanks to people less willfully ignorant than Ron Johnson, rather than re-design and re-manufacture those sub-components themselves.

Finally, when it turns out that if the U.S. manufacturers are required to commit capital to reinventing the Chinese wheel and thereby increasing the cost of the finished product to end users, Ron Johnson supports trade agreements that would encourage those end users to just go ahead and buy the whole shooting match from China anyway.

Supposedly this is the so-called accounting and manufacturing expertise that Johnson touts as his main qualification to the Senate.

Not only does Johnson not have any solutions — he doesn't even "believe" there's a problem — his non-solutions don't make any sense.

But he'd make a pretty good creationist.

1 comment:

gnarlytrombone said...

actually claimed that excess carbon dioxide so produced "gets sucked down by trees and helps the trees grow."

This subject was not broached in the re-education videos.