Rachel Maddow long has preferred snark over facts, but now she’s misrepresenting the position of one of her own guests.
Maddow claimed that Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., “believes that the Bible debunks all of climate science” by posting an insulting item on her blog. The item, entitled “Inhofe refutes climate science with scripture,” accused the senator, whom she called “far right,” of making an “odd argument” by basing his opposition to climate-change alarmism on his Christianity.
Of course, Inhofe’s latest book “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” is not a book of scriptural analysis. Instead, it is a tightly packed text that combines biographical information, political analysis, and reams of scientific data and information on the reality – or unreality – of manmade global warming, including selected excerpts from the “Climategate” scientific scandal.
“Climategate” revealed that several “scientists” deliberately were manipulating the data surrounding climate change in order to create a false scientific consensus that global warming was dramatically increasing due to human activity.
However, Inhofe does have an aside on one page that quotes Genesis 8:22, “As long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.”
Inhofe also mentions Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, who wrote a devotional in his book “Promises” about how it is God who “maintains the seasons.” On page 175, the senator repeats the Genesis verse, after detailing the defeat of cap and trade. These two references are exclamation points on hundreds of pages of cold, hard scientific data.
Inhofe used the citation while appearing on Voice of Christian Youth America’s radio program Crosstalk with Vic Ellison. While Inhofe used scripture in this interview with Christian radio, the left wing People for the American Way highlighted the interview on its ominously titled Right Wing Watch site and phrased the senator’s position as “human influenced climate change is impossible because ‘Gods’ still up there.'”
Even using scripture as part of a larger discussion with an explicitly Christian organization is subject to mockery. Maddow’s blog also features “This Week in God,” a segment specifically dedicated to attacking religious organizations.
Of course, Inhofe also cites Rachel Maddow in “The Greatest Hoax,” quoting a five-minute segment she aired on Dec. 3, 2009, which called him a “mountain of indignation” for global warming activists. The senator says this was one of the major efforts to “go after” him before the Copenhagen climate conference, where Inhofe told the world that the United States would not pass cap and trade. Maddow long has identified Inhofe as a primary obstacle to global warming activists, and with good reason.
She is not alone. This controversy comes only days after Inhofe was called a “call girl” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in response to “The Greatest Hoax.” The senator noted that this represented an actual elevation in the dialogue as Kennedy previously had called him a “traitor” and suggested that he should be imprisoned or executed. Now, the rhetoric has shifted, with Inhofe transformed from a prostitute to a Puritan.
Maddow’s dismissal of the senator’s Christian beliefs should make for an interesting topic in the senator’s appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show on Tuesday night, March 13, at 9:30 p.m. Eastern. Both science and scripture are valid topics as Inhofe goes into hostile territory on the show that called him “an inconvenient truth” for climate-change activists.
