“Morning Joe.” Despite being on MSNBC, the “liberal” cable channel, it’s a right wing love fest and permanent free PR spiel for Donald Trump. Hosted by loud, overbearing ex-congress critter Joe Scarborough, it features a heavily conservative-weighted roster of pundits, and can be seriously a little bit of torture to watch.
But watch I do.
I watch because it gets my blood pressure up enough to stay awake at that hour of the morning, and because I like to know what the chattering classes who surround and support our oligarchs are thinking and saying. It’s a window into the Beltway echo chamber, and as such, can be instructive. It’s a way of hearing what those on the right who are not slavering lunatics are thinking – and this morning, it provided an unexpected bright spot!
This morning, right at the end of the show, Bill Nye the Science Guy was granted a brief audience to pitch his new book, “Unstoppable,” and I am delighted to report that it looked very like the GOP has begun running out of arguments on climate change! Why do I say that? Well, here's what went down.
Nye, looking dapper and twinkly, opened by talking briefly about his parents, both WWII vets, and part of a generation who famously “got things done.” He then proposed that what America needs now is a “new Greatest Generation” to lead the world in tackling climate change. This opened up space for Scarborough to raise the tired old “but what do we do with respect to China and India who aren’t playing along on emissions?” canard. Nye pounced.
First, he got Scarborough to say, glumly, that he was “down with” the concept that the world is warming. (Scarborough resisted admitting that human activity is the main driver, but did reluctantly agree that humans are partly to blame.) Then Nye challenged Scarborough on the idea that America can’t lead and show the rest of the world – including China and India – how it’s done. Nye opined that, for better or for worse, America’s greatest export is our culture, driving home the point by noting Mickey Mouse’s global name recognition. Part of that culture, the suggestion was, could be leadership on this most pressing of issues.
Poor Scarborough had no counter. Instead, he turfed the questioning over to GOP communications maven Nicole D. Wallace.
As a Very Important Looking graph showed viewers how deeply Americans DO NOT GIVE A SHIT about climate change – the graph rated it as being important to only 8% of people surveyed – Wallace put on a “serious real world issues” face and asked Nye to explain why we should do anything about climate change, given how few Americans think it’s important. She was careful to intone “jobs,” and “economy,” in her preface, hoping to reinforce how trivial the changing climate is in the real world where actual people live.
No dice. Nye swatted her away, saying briskly that leadership was required to GET people to care – and that some leaders are actually now doing just that.
When you are throwing American exceptionalism and leadership in the face of conservatives and using it to argue that we can lead the world in the fight against climate change, well… you may not yet have them on the ropes, but you’re gaining momentum.
It was delicious. I could practically hear Scarborough’s nails scrabbling on the scree of the slippery slope down, down, inexorably down to reality. To a full admission that climate change is real and we have no choice but to do something about it.
Conservatives who live in the real world (yes, there are some – and they inhabit that Beltway bubble where “Morning Joe” is an important piece of broadcasting) have no real arguments left. This morning it was wonderful to watch them try to be serious about the deeply unserious denialism they’ve been wallowing in for so long, while being relentlessly herded toward rational thought by Bill Nye.
What must it be like to be a Republican these days? What must it be like to wake up every morning with the taste of ashes in your mouth? What must it be like (if you have a brain in your head, and I am not saying they all do) to read every single day in the news that something you “believe in” is just plain WRONG. To realize that your political beliefs and world view have been wrong on almost everything?
Take a conservative position, any position, and it’s been wrong: on women – on race – on guns – on the economy and jobs – on health insurance – on sexual politics – on rights for gay and bi and queer and questioning and trans people – on climate change… the list goes on.
Frankly, it must be terrifying.
Of course, we still have a very long way to go on so many of those fights. The right wing isn’t throwing in the towel any time soon. The conservative movement is still dangerous – perhaps now more than ever.
There’s not much more dangerous than a wounded, cornered, terrified predator. And this one has money, and has declared its Frankenstein spawn “Corporation” to be a person. This wounded predator class has a rigged system of jurisprudence, a gerrymandered power base in many states, and an immense amount of power at their disposal. Not to mention their activist conservative base – rabid, riled up citizens desperate to bring back “their America” and howling for revenge.
The long battles for human rights, true democracy, untrammeled diversity, economic justice, and environmental stewardship of the planet are nowhere near over. There’s so much work to do on so many fronts that some days it just feels overwhelming. But this morning for one brief moment, as I watched just two individual conservatives on a relatively lightly-watched morning show sputter and stammer in retreat on the issue of climate change, IT WAS DELECTABLE.