Roger Pielke Jr. – Noble victim of threats and McCarthyite oppression

Wherein Pielke the Younger reprises his role as The Victim Bully…

Here he is voluntarily responding to some questions from the Frighteningly Powerful [no offense, Brad!] Brad Johnson:

As far as your line of questions so far, they are evocative of how, in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy went after people he thought associated with Communists. [Lengthy transcript excerpt follows]

Charlie Chaplin was but one of McCarthy's victims

The difference of course being that answering a few questions from a lefty blogger from CAP (when it’s become clear that one has put himself on Inhofe-Morano’s FUD mailing list) is in no way detrimental to one’s career. No one has dragged him in front of a governmental committee. Brad’s questions were all tame and reasonably anticipated coming from a left-of-center organization like CAP. If there is a “black list” Pielke has been added to, it is Inhofe’s, and Pielke’s own pen did the writing.

Of course this posturing is nothing new.

More climate and security news

Image courtesy of Flickr user B Tal

Climate and security are back in the news, with both the New Yorker and [h/t CP] WaPo running articles in response to a recent conference entitled: “The Next World: How Should the United States Respond to Rising Powers?” held jointly by the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, and the globalization-oriented think tanks the New America Foundation and the Stanley Foundation.

The overarching theme of the conference was America’s role in a non-polar world, and both the New Yorker and WaPo articles focused on its climate-security implications. Paronomasia aside, climate change is being increasingly viewed as a serious security concern among defense and intelligence experts, as threats at least as deserving of attention as our current terrorism and WMD-proliferation focuses. This is significant, as Ezra Klein notes, because traditionally large militaries such as ours make the repeated error of preparing to fight the battle they’ve most recently fought as opposed to the battle that may have to fight down the road: