Conservatives have some reason to question a Mitt Romney presidential run. Although the former Massachusetts Governor possesses admirable traits — he is a family man who has stuck by his wife through sickness; he salvaged the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from corrupt mismanagement; and he made his career in the private sector, rather than as a politician — there are plenty of troubling things as well.
His state effort at health care in Massachusetts has been a disaster. Taxes in that state remain high, and although Romney never had a Republican legislature to help him, he did not stop the state from keeping the nickname “Taxachusetts,” especially labeled that by those fleeing to New Hampshire.
In 1994 Romney ran a very tough race against Senator Ted Kennedy, coming close to unseating him. He passed, however, on using his gubernatorial popularity to challenge John Kerry or take another stab at the late Senator Kennedy (even though Scott Brown proved that an energetic, articulate (though far-from-conservative) Republican could win in that strongly Democratic state).
What Romney said recently at a New Hampshire town meeting, however, will cause anyone who opposes rampant statism — including statists’ adherence to the debunked idea of "manmade global warming" and the junk science which supports it — to have strong reservations about supporting his run for the Republican nomination. Part of the caution is because of his apparent genuflection to political correctness and the other part is simply because of his muddy thinking.
Last week Romney declared:
I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world is getting warmer. I believe humans contribute to that. … I don’t know how much our contribution is to that, because I know there have been periods of greater heat and warmth in the past. But I believe that we contribute to that.
And so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you’re seeing. Now how do we go about doing that? … One of the opportunities, I think, is that people who are really focused on climate change and global warming have the same interests as the people who are really focused, as I am, on getting ourselves off of our dependence on foreign oil. … One way is to use more natural gas in the production of electricity — to use more natural gas in the propulsion of our vehicles. Natural gas is far less CO2-emitting, and it’s also domestic.
It is unclear if Romney is aware of the widespread academic corruption surrounding the claim of manmade global warming, or if he has taken that into account and still believes we are making the planet warmer. It is also unclear why he believes global warming is bad, if indeed there is global warming, especially when he accepts that our planet’s climate has been changing for a long time — with or without man’s help.
It is, in fact, the very lack of clarity which makes Romney’s comments troubling. The fraud and oppression those within the scientific community used in order to reach the politically-correct result of "global warming" is not a new story. The hypocrisy of global warming nabobs such as Al Gore is also well documented. This sort of reckless indifference to truth by Romney may well turn off voters in 2012.
Those who oppose the federal government overreaching its bounds know that the real calamities to our environment have been caused by not building nuclear power plants (facilities that are currently providing much of France’s entire electrical supply), not drilling for oil in Alaska (ostensibly to protect a tiny number of Artic wildlife which may not be endangered at all), shutting down offshore drilling (thus taking good jobs away from hard-working Americans), and raising so many regulations on coal mining that this abundant resource is not being mined as it should be.
Romney seems to have slipped into the chic and comfortable “science” which, among other things, rejects Intelligent Design because ID maintains that it is not the chaotic and random mutations of microscopic life that produced the sublime beauty of the human body, but rather the unseen hand of the Creator. Science, that creature of medieval Christians in universities, has been twisted to become the handmaiden of modern statist ideology. Mitt Romney seems not to understand that important truth.
