The Green Dragon is a Superhero, Not a Villain

The Republican strategy over the last 40 years can be boiled down to one phrase: they are the party of discontent. It's easier to get mad about the state of the world than it is to fix it; it's easier to breed discontent than loyalty to a cause.

It's also easy to create chaos as a smokescreen to legislate morality and advance a selfish corporate agenda that favors the rich.

As the party seems to run increasingly in lockstep with the Religious Right of late, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the two groups. Although not all Republicans belong to the Religious Right (the smartest ones only sell their souls for tax cuts and corporate socialism), all Religious Right folks are Republicans, and so their fates are in concert.

As such, while I don't find this latest news surprising, I do find it eminently troubling:

Various conservative Christian leaders have united with the Cornwall Alliance for the release of a shocking new 12-part DVD series, "Resisting The Green Dragon," that attempts to debase and discredit the environmental movement by portraying it as "one of the greatest deceptions of our day" that is "seducing your children" and "striving to put America and the world under its destructive control."

In the video, David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, attests that environmentalists' "false assertions are based more on their own morbid pessimistic fears, not on any good science," while the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Dr. Richard Land, says, "Environmentalists have a long history of believing and promoting exaggerations and myths" -- statements both so steeped in irony that they are hardly worth parrying.

"One of the greatest threats to society and the church today is the multifaceted environmentalist movement," says Cornwall Alliance founder and national spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. "There isn't an aspect of life that it doesn't seek to force into its own mold."

(courtesy HuffPo)

Boy, that WallBuilder fellow sure is good at his job...of building walls wherever they can be built, regardless of need. At least, I assume that's what his job is, since no other description seems to fit the bill.

And so it goes that religious groups continue their relentless march to breed discontent between people who would otherwise find substantial common ground.

All religious doctrine, abridged:

Be nice to people, unless they belong to another group of people who also want to be nice to people. In this case, they are your enemy.

And so the ongoing Republican attack on all the "anti-religious" social advancements of the last 100+ years and vital "job-killing" environmental regulations has a delightfully bold ally in their quest to end mankind's tenure on Earth way ahead of schedule.

 Check out the Great Pacific Garbage Patch here

An important thing to note here that most people might not realize is that these wackos are not attacking climate change here; they are attacking environmentalism. While the end goal for both philosophies is a greener, healthier Earth, environmentalism is much more all-encompassing. Environmentalism is focused on conserving Earth's precious resources, on making sure air is clean and breathable, etc.

To attack environmentalism is to split the conservative war into two fronts, which--as Hitler proved--is never a good idea. I hope this will be the Religio-Conservative Asshole, Inc.'s Russian front moment, but after last fall's elections and the national response to the financial crisis and health care bill, who is to say what the gullible electorate is capable of supporting.

Say what you want about whether or not mankind is responsible for the accelerated change in our climate, but to argue that we should not enact grandiose change to combat the effects of a warming planet and conserve the resources we have left is asinine.

If the Earth will automatically replace all the oil, coal, and ore we have removed from its depths and the world is warming on its own, will any of that matter when all our greatest cities are underwater and tidal waves, tornadoes, and blizzards become daily occurrences, food supplies are devastated, and starving mobs of hobos hack people apart with rusted knives for sustenance? Should we really split hairs here?

The bottom line is that our planet is warming, our weather is increasingly unpredictable and devastating, and we need to do something about it no matter the cause. If you are in league against the Green Dragon you are moron of epic proportions and I hope you get beheaded by an old cathode-ray tube blown off a garbage pile in the next tornado.

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