I’m sitting here in my brother’s office in Dallas, Texas, gazing out the window at a foot of snow. It’s by no means the first time I’ve ever seen this much snow in the States – but this is Dallas, where any amount of snow is extremely rare, and even then only gets 1-2 inches of the white stuff.
But it seems this year Mother Nature decided to give us Southerners a taste of what our northern neighbours get every winter.
Much like folks in Ireland, the residents of Dallas also find it difficult to cope with snowfalls in excess of a couple if inches. Indeed, when it comes to the white stuff, folks in Dallas are just as big wimps as Dubliners!
On second thought, maybe I should be a bit kinder to those wimps in Dallas, since the most recent snowfall actually broke the all-time record of 7.5 inches in a single day. I’m also fairly certain the January snows in Dublin were similarly record-setting. I?think it’s safe to say this winter has been much colder than normal for much of the southern United States and the British Isles. So what caused this to happen?
Meteorologists have cited a combination of two interacting phenomena – the El Nino weather patterns caused by warmer-than-normal Pacific Ocean waters, and a high pressure system in the northern hemisphere called the North Atlantic Oscillation. But here in the US, the climate change deniers have seized on this frigid weather as evidence that scientists’ predictions about global warming are all wet – since a colder winter with more snow runs counter to their concept of a ‘warming’ world.
Of course, our unusually snowy winter actually provides support for climate scientists, since they’ve predicted that global warming will increase the amount of water vapour in the earth’s atmosphere, causing heavier precipitation in the northern hemisphere.
But I am much less disturbed by Mother Nature’s machinations than I am by the recent actions Sarah Palin, who recently gave a speech at the inaugural ‘tea party’ convention of ant-tax and anti-government activists in which she assailed President Obama and his policies. She also lent support to the many ‘birthers’ in attendance – who claim that Obama is not an American citizen – when she told a conservative radio talk show audience that it is “rightfully” an issue with the American public, and that it is “fair game” for politicians to question Obama’s citizenship.
What does it say about the state of American politics, not to mention the Republican Party, that one of its leading political figures won’t disavow such an extremist conspiracy theory?
Unfortunately, Palin isn’t the only female Republican lending support to our country’s crackpots. Here in Texas, Debbie Medina – who’s currently in the race for the state governor’s seat – was asked by conservative talk show pundit Glenn Beck for her opinion about the ‘9/11 truthers’. These are right-wing conservative extremists who believe that the US government was secretly involved in the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington DC.
Beck asked Medina point blank: “Do you believe the government was any way involved with the bringing down of the World Trade Center on 9/11?” I was flabbergasted when I heard Medina respond: “I don’t, I don’t have all of the evidence there, Glenn. So I don’t, I’m not in a place… I have not been out publicly questioning that. I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard.”
To think that this woman, thanks largely to the backing of those involved in the tea party movement, may actually win the nomination for governor is almost more than I can bear.
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in International Relations and lectures on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU
