From Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech (emphasis mine)…
The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach — and condemnation without discussion — can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.
Thanks to M. Duss at the Wonk Room for pointing out the highlighted text. Duss says about the highlighted bit…
That’s a wonderfully succinct description of the simplistic and destructive ideology that drove George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and which Bill Kristol is still trying heartily to convince himself and others hasn’t been discredited. This isn’t to say that Obama hasn’t retained some troubling elements of Bush’s national security policy, which progressives will continue to challenge and debate. But I think it’s hugely important to recognize that the key foreign policy conceit of the Bush years, the idea that America is in an existential struggle with a monolithic, undifferentiated Islamofascist other, has been discarded. And America — and the world — is safer for that.
I’ll go a step further and say that it applies to many of the “Tea Party Patriots” and their vitriolic outrage toward anything and everything surrounding Obama, non-Christian religions, homosexuality, abortion, and a number of other issues. Their arguments and manufactured controversies, mostly vapid, provide for them the “satisfying purity of indignation” that rational thinking and critical analysis do not.
Hardly befitting someone claiming to be a “patriot.”
The “ClimateGate” email “scandal” about climate change reminds me very much about the manufactured controversy about evolution and Charles Darwin. How so?
In the case of evolution, deniers will frequently make accusations that Darwin was racist, or misogynistic, or anti-Semitic as “evidence” that evolution by natural selection is unreliable (or untrue). Whether those claims about Darwin are true or not is debatable, but even if they were all true, it has zero effect on the validity of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Scientific theories are based on facts, not the personalities of researchers.
With “ClimateGate,” deniers focus on a small number of cherry-picked, old emails from a few climate scientists, take them out of context, twist (or misunderstand) their meanings, point out some crankiness on the part of the scientists, and claim that they somehow debunk and discredit decades of climate research and mountains of evidence compiled and analyzed by hundreds (or thousands?) of other climate scientists.
It’s absurd thinking of the highest degree.