GOP and Trump - Another Reply to John Fedorchak

One tactic used by the GOP is the straw man fallacy whereby one misrepresents another's position, then argues against the misrepresented position. An old example is when the GOP claimed that Al Gore said that he invented the internet. Gore was instrumental in the legislation that allowed the creation of the internet, but he never claimed to have invented it. 

John Fedorchak used the straw man fallacy against Gore (why always Gore?) in his Review letter of Sept. 21 where he misrepresented the claims made in Gore's 2006 documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.  Most of Gore's predictions were accurate, a few probably premature (Kilimanjaro ice cover), but overall the average global temperature has and will continue to rise, sea levels have risen and will continue to rise, and the ice minimum at the north pole has shrunk and will continue to shrink. The south pole is gaining less ice each year and will lose ice in the future. Republicans and Trump deny global warming because they are being funded to deny it by fossil fuel producers. John Fedorchak denies it because he blindly swallows anything the GOP, Trump, or Fox "News" puts forth.

Another tactic used by the GOP is transference of blame. Here, a racist Trump claims that Hillary Clinton is a racist, or Trump claiming that Obama created ISIS when ISIS was actually created by the void left in Iraq by Bush's war of choice. John uses the blame transference tactic by spewing a series of locations about which the GOP has tried to create conspiracies over several decades but has failed. The only conspiracies are in the minds of the GOP and Trump, and they waste taxpayer money trying to prove them. John then attempts to pass his inability to provide specific evidence against my arguments as questionable arguments on my part.

The GOP and Trump are fond of the ad hominem fallacy whereby one attacks the person rather than the argument. When it was rumoured that George H.W. Bush would be voting for Hillary Clinton, the Trump campaign attributed it to his age, implying mental deficiency. To list Trump's use of ad hominem attacks would require several volumes as would those of Fox "News." John's childish use of "a battle of wits with an unarmed person" is so clichéd that trying to find the first use of the phrase brought up Shakespeare among many others. I've read some Shakespeare, and, John, you're no Shakespeare.

To divert attention from why Trump won't release his taxes or his medical records, the GOP went ballistic over Hillary's health and fabricated a major email scandal even though investigations have found nothing. When Trump bribed an attorney general, or misused his family foundation for personal gain, the GOP said, as John would say, "look, there's a squirrel."

John's citations to disprove global warming are weak at best. Larry Bell is a professor of architecture who has never published a climate-related article in a peer-reviewed climate journal. Dr. Roy Spencer is a PhD meteorologist who publishes climate related papers mainly for Fox "News", the WSJ, Congressional staffers, and blogs. When confronted by NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt about one of his papers, Spencer agreed that his work could not disprove anthropogenic global warming. Climate scientists don't take Spencer seriously because "he's been wrong too many times."

John references El Niño, which is a periodic warming of the surface of the eastern Pacific Ocean. Consensus among climate scientists is that warmer oceans strengthen an El Niño event which then may exacerbate global warming during the event, which then may exacerbate the next El Niño. Rinse and repeat. Overall, the Earth's average temperature rises because of the release of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use through human activity.

John concludes with, "Do not blindly accept global warming as fact." I agree. Don't accept anything blindly. Get the facts from reliable sources. Don't believe anything on Fox "News" and ignore anything Donald Trump says.

An assessment of Donald Trump was written in the New York Observer, whose owner and publisher is Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump and his first wife, Ivana. A few excerpts follow: Donald Trump is a liar.... He has no relationship to the truth.... Each and every one of Trump’s surrogates are liars—morally vapid validators, town criers doing the dirty work of the village idiot.... This campaign is a human stain.... His is a cruel and despicable view of American life.

John L. Ferri

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