Mailbag 1/27

Reagan's Obama column way off target

The piffle and drivel of Michael Reagan's recent "Great Orator Made Poor Speech" column, makes me think that Mike, a right-wing hack, gained journalistic prominence by trading on daddy's celebrity. The gist of the column is "My dad could give better speeches than Obama."

Junior Reagan writes: "I was talking to Peter Robinson, who helped write the immortal 'Tear Down This Wall, Mr. Gorbachev' speech delivered in Berlin by my dad, Ronald Reagan."

Is the speech really "immortal?" Is "immortal" different from "frequently quoted" when the event is still so recent? Isn't it just the line, "Tear down this wall," which is quoted? Can you remember any other lines from that speech? Does one memorable line make a speech great?

Silliness and deviousness abound in Reagan's attempt to belittle President Obama's inaugural address. In making a sophistical argument formed of logical fallacies and propaganda techniques, the younger and less accomplished Reagan deserves recognition as a demagogue, desperately delivering ad populum appeals to a withered conservative base.

He quotes Obama: "These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights."

Reagan claims this one sentence makes the entire speech redolent of Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech.

Whereas "my dad," he says, referred to "morning in America" in his first inaugural, Obama's "was more like 'mourning' in America." Mikey then conveniently ignores Obama's optimism and determination in the very next lines: "Today ... the challenges we face are real, they are serious and they are many ... but know this, America: They will be met!"

Then comes this unsubstantiated assertion: "The difference between (them) was that my dad believed everything he said all the way to the core of his being, while Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats use speeches to mask what they really believe."

I won't comment on the sophomoric unfounded generalization. However, seeing how Mikey brought it up, I will address President Reagan's believing "everything he said all the way to the core of his being."

President Reagan was renowned for repeatedly telling the story of a bomber pilot whose plane was shot down in WWII. Everyone had baled out except the pilot and a seriously wounded bombardier.

After squawking the pilot and explaining his predicament, the bombardier received this reply, "That's OK, son, we'll ride her down together." According to President Reagan, the pilot posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Ah, but who reported the story if everyone either baled out or was killed in the crash? No one: The story is apocryphal. President Reagan had seen the movie, but he told the story so often that it became reality for him. I'm sure psychologists have some technical term for this phenomenon — "delusional," perhaps.

If "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," does Mikey believe everything he says?

Robert Reid,

Wisconsin Dells

More question global warming than support it

Kurt Goeckermann (Jan. 21) disputes Andrea Lombard and Audrey Parker's letter that cited evidence against CO2 global warming. He ducked their data by calling it biased, and claimed an unbiased CO2 global warming consensus by the "vast bulk" of climatologists.

That's his logic, in a nutshell. To support it, he did a Web check on the dissenters, but not on the global warming proponents. Thus, he himself committed bias, and it does him in.

Proponents of CO2 global warming rely on IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), set up by the U.N. in 1988 with the explicit "programme" of proving that aerial CO2 is unduly warming the earth. IPCC does no research; instead, its bureaucrats rewrite scientific input, biasing it to "prove" CO2 global warming. They admit it.

In that spirit, IPCC's 2001 Report touted a "hockey stick" global temperature curve, flat for the last thousand years, with an abrupt rise the last 50 years when CO2 notably shot up. Voila! A picture-perfect smoking-gun proof of CO2 global warming. Then reality hit; the critics Goeckermann derides showed it was false, so IPCC had to dump it.

Dr. Michael Coffman, in a Web article, counts up IPCC's "vast scientific consensus." Of the 2,500 experts on its 2007 panel, only 308 were scientists, and of those, only 40 backed any part of its 2007 Report, and only four endorsed it. That's no "consensus."

Goeckermann also derided the 2008 Heartland Climate Conference. Yet, IPCC scientists attended it and denounced the 2007 IPCC Report (Coffman). Each attendee got a 40-page scientific summary by a volunteer group of 23 climatologists chaired by Dr. Fred Singer, a lifelong leader in climatology. Download it, to see actual climate data.

Several scientific petitions dispute CO2 global warming alarmism (Coffman). The one blasted by Goeckermann, i.e., the petition with 31,072 signatories, included 9,021 Ph.D.s (of which I was one). As another approach, 50 scientific experts adopted a programmatic dissent called the "Copenhagen Consensus," reviewed in Bjorn Lomborg's 2007 book, "Cool It"; it's a needed dose of reality, focused on human and environmental issues at stake.

In sum, more scientists have questioned CO2 global warming alarmism than support it. To those scientists, the data question it. Data, not biases, are the standard of proof.

Dr. Robert Bowman,

Ph.D., Cross Plains