I never know what to say to people who utter such things. So the best thing I can think to say about this Jeff Id post (of a separate article) is that he sincerely believes it. Jeff really believes that Obama is deliberately trying to destroy capitalism so that a Marxist/socialist system can eventually be installed in the U.S.

Actually, the best thing that could be said about this comes via a comment left at Jeff’s site:

This sounds like right-wing pot-head paranoia.

And just for kicks, here’s a recent post by Joe Romm that blames Obama for the ruination of civilization, or something like that, for not tackling climate legislation before the health care bill. What’s delicious about this post, though, is Romm’s particular citation from his favorite op-ed columnist:

As Tom Friedman wrote last year in “The Inflection is Near?“ [Emphasis is by Romm]

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog Climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

I suppose this is Joe’s way of letting his readers know that what he says’s here about our rapacious behavior is extra noteworthy because Thomas Friedman quotes it.

Anyway, Joe’s Ponzi scheme musings is the stuff of Jeff Id’s paranoid nightmares.

In light of the recent George Will/Al Gore/Andrew Revkin blogosphere controversy, kudos to John Fleck for revisiting this important 2007 Yale study.

Still, I’m not sure what to make of the study’s essential finding– that your position on say, nuclear power or nanotechnolgy, is influenced by credible individuals who share your political beliefs. There are several ways to look at this. To me, one of the more interesting implications is that a credible person who adopts a view at odds with his own politics or worldview will be taken seriously by members of his political tribe.

So, for example, I could never prove this, but my gut tells me that Andrew Sullivan’s blogging over the last four years has  influenced the way many conservatives came to view the war in Iraq and George W. Bush. (Of course, to many others, he has committed blasphemy.)

On the other hand, John McCain’s staunch anti-abortion record would seem to put him in high standing with religious conservatives, so that when he called out a few of their leaders in 2000 as “agents of intolerance,” he should have been viewed credibly. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Then, related to the policy and political debate over global warming, there is the curious case of Roger Pielke, Jr., who last June said this on his blog:

Let me emphasize that anthropogenic climate change is real, and deserving of significant attention to both adaptation and mitigation.

Yet, there seem to be a number of prominent climate scientists and influential bloggers who view him as an agent of climate change deniers.  (More on this perception in a future post. In the meantime, see this reasoned assessment.) Thus, he is unable to make inroads with a significant portion of the environmental community which, nonetheless, shares his view that global warming is a problem in need of a solution.

Conversely, despite Pielke’s stated belief “that anthropogenic climate change is real,” he has what is thought (but I don’t know if this is true) to be many admirring blog readers who, to put it charitably, are dubious of global warming as a serious environmental threat. (I’ll point out that this general characterization of his blog’s readership seems based on an interpretation of the commenters, which, valid or not, is still a skewed metric.)

At any rate, even if we take this characterization of Pielke’s reader demographic at face value, following the logic of the Yale study, why then isn’t Pielke Jr. convincing these skeptics (who evidently view him credibly) to abandon their erroneous stance?

Perhaps all this means is that some people are willing to see more than one side of the debate.

At the very least, what I like about Pielke Jr and Andrew Sullivan is their willingness to defy tribal categorization. Independent thought should be valued above party politics or ideological purity.  I’m not sure if it makes them more or less persuasive to members of other tribes. But to me it sure makes them more edifying, more interesting, and less predictable to read than many others in the blogosphere.