Day 31: The Gray Lady Redux

There’s been quite a bit of buzz about Osama Bin Laden’s recent statements on global warming. The New York Times wrote something about it…so I took the opportunity to drop a little note in their mailbox.

It is a sad state of affairs when one of the world’s most notorious criminals speaks more accurately about global climate change than many of our own elected representatives. Now it is absolutely certain that climate-change denialists will use Bin Laden’s words to suggest that realistically confronting the largest existential threat humanity has ever faced is somehow un-American, a capitulation to Al-Qaeda. I remember how conservatives responded to Soviet criticism of the USA on civil rights issues in the fifties and sixties: by calling patriots like Martin Luther King “communists,” suggesting their actions were “controlled by Moscow.” The fact that Khrushchev was a murderous thug didn’t stop him from correctly assessing American racial hypocrisy; the fact that Bin Laden is a murderous thug doesn’t mean that his statements on global warming are invalid. It just means that American conservatives are easily swayed by irrelevant ad hominem arguments.

Warren Senders