Excerpt:
Meanwhile, Republicans who do believe in global warming get shunted aside. Nicole Gaudiano of Gannett News Service recently reported that Rep. Wayne Gilchrest asked to be on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio refused to allow it unless Gilchrest would say that humans have not contributed to global warming. The Maryland Republican refused and was denied a seat.
Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), both research scientists, also were denied seats on the committee. Normally, relevant expertise would be considered an advantage. In this case, it was a disqualification; if the GOP allowed Republican researchers who accept the scientific consensus to sit on a global warming panel, it would kill the party's strategy of making global warming seem to be the pet obsession of Democrats and Hollywood lefties.
There you have it, expertise and dissent are pushed aside for ideologues without credentials, and for partisan politics and pandering. The debate on global warming is far from decided, but do we really serve anyones interest by supressing a candid debate.
This also reminds me about the Nancy Pelosi treatment of Jane Harmon regarding the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, where partisanship trumped expertise in a vital area.
Then again supression of ideas is what the partisan politics of the far-left and far-right are all about, why should we be surprised?
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