Environment presents cognitive dissonance

I've been noticing lately that more and more of the Wingnutteria is beginning to clue into the fact that there's a serious contradiction between claiming to be all about "family values" and not valuing your very own children enough to want to leave them a planet to live on. I saw this defensive column recently trying to grapple with the contradiction, and that's riding on a wave of evangelicals who can't stand the contradiction anymore and are overcoming their repulsion at the feminizing effects of caring about the environment to make sure their own virility trophies have an adulthood worth having of their own. I mention it, because I think it's the tension that caused Victor Davis Hanson's head to explode recently, with this Corner posting.

It is scary when Speaker Pelosi claims “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” or Al Gore barks about his utopian plan to shut down all generators of electricity except wind and solar within 10 years — or else: “The future of human civilization is at stake." Or Obama claims that at the "moment" of his nomination over Hillary (?) "The rise of the oceans began to slow." Call this ecobonics, geo-narcissism, or hokey science — or a variant strain of Bush Derangement Syndrome — but it is creepy nonetheless.

To answer Roy's question about the racism of "ecobonics", I suspect it was a ham-handed attempt to remind the audience that Obama is black, as if the NRO audience would ever forget.

I'm telling you, though, it's the "future of human civilization" thing that made him lose it. Conservatives justify their very existence as preservers of civilization, and the ugly reality is that global warming puts human civilization in direct danger, meaning that they're forced to decide between their stated values---civilization, family---and their real values, which are protecting the short term profits of the richest corporations in our country, even at the expense of family and civilization. Well, that and protecting their fragile male egos from the taint of "feminine" qualities like caring about other people. The contradictions are delicious, really. So sure that the masculine and the feminine can be safely considered opposites, but then faced with the fact that the manly virtue of taking responsibility for your children's future is impossible without being all girly and caring about the planet.

The good news is that it's becoming harder and harder for the mainstream media to do their job of papering over these contradictions and glorifying right wing ideas. The MSM types try to take their cues from the Davis Hansons of the world, but that's increasingly hard to do. "Ecobonics"? David Brooks and Maureen Dowd can't put lipstick on that pig.