Salon Derides ‘Loony’ Rep. Louie Gohmert for ‘Dumb & Dumber’ Climate Views
Editor's note: When MRC Business wrote this story, the Salon byline listed Peter Finocchiaro, Salon Deputy Editor, as the author. Sometime after that, Salon changed the byline to Bob Cesca.
Being out of lockstep with climate alarmism infuriates the left, including liberal online magazine editors like Salon Deputy Editor Peter Finocchiaro.
Finocchiaro lashed out at Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, on July 10, with at least eight nasty names or adjectives including “goon,” “loony,” “buffoonish” and “marble-mouthed” because Gohmert had the audacity to say that Pope Francis had been taken in by global warming alarmists.
“Since when does science not allow opposing viewpoints,” Gohmert asked July 8, during an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. “Well, they didn’t allow Galileo to make an opposing viewpoint. There were a lot of accurate opposing viewpoints that weren't allowed at the time that were later allowed to come in.”
That was too much for the Salon editor who responded by attacking the congressman’s “anti-science gibberish” and caricaturing his argument, saying that “Gohmert clings to this notion that he’s just like Galileo and that his version of science is actually correct.”
He hurled another insult saying, Gohmert “probably can’t spell heliocentrism, much less define the scientific method.” Insults against the congressman’s intelligence were pervasive in Finocchiaro’s article about Gohmert’s “‘Dumb & Dumber’ philosophy of climate denial.” How scientific.
Finocchiaro either decided to ignore or failed to understand Gohmert’s critique of consensus-driven science, since he slammed Gohmert for “desperately grabbing onto a statistically minuscule number of scientists whose theories run contrary to the other 97 percent” of scientists. That statistic is a popular, but highly misleading alarmist “myth,” that was defined so weakly it includes many of the scientists Finocchiaro would name-call as “deniers.”
