20080530 Commentary on Global Warming by Mark Tapscott

Global Warming: Destined to be the new 'Bloody Shirt' in American politics

Tapscott's Copy Desk May 30, 2008

There were 16 presidential elections between 1868 and 1928 and Democrats won in only four of those contests, with only two candidates, Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland. More often, whenever it looked like a Democrat might have a shot at the White House, Republicans would "wave the bloody shirt." End of election story.

Waving the bloody shirt was as easy as GOP party leaders and candidates simply reminding Northern Republican voters that it was the overwhelmingly Democratic South that seceded in 1861 and ignited the Civil War, the most cataclysmic event in the nation's history. For more than half a century, that fact was an unavoidable and impassable obstacle for virtually all Democrats who nurtured dreams of becoming the nation's commander-in-chief.

What does this relic of American political history have to do with contemporary politics and campaigns? Well, the phenomenon is about to be repeated in a sense. The Senate takes up debate when it returns from the Memorial Day recess on S. 2191, the Warner-Lieberman bill known as "America's Security Act."

All three remaining presidential candidates support Warner-Lieberman or variations of it and the proposal has generated widespread enthusiasm in the mainstream media and among environmental activists. The proposal would cap the nation's greenhouse gas emissions - mainly carbon dioxide, which allegedly cause global warming - from combustion of petroleum, coal and natural gas from all sources, then set up a complicated system of "credits" that companies would buy and sell.

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Columnist Charles Krauthammer has a superb piece in today's edition of The Washington Post.

That is exactly the point. It's also why The Examiner published this editorial earlier this week on why environmentalism isn't about the environment, it's about power for the elite.

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