Francis W. Porretto - Eternity Road

Francis W. Porretto - Eternity Road

Here are a few PDOOMAs of recent vintage:

• Al Gore's claim that, if nothing is done about "global warming," Earth will experience a sea level rise of twenty feet.
• Marian Wright Edelman's claim that every extra dollar devoted to governmentally funded day care would ultimately save $3.38 in federal and state expenditures.
• Congressional Democrats claim that $500 billion can be squeezed out of Medicare expenditures over the next ten years by "eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse."
• Barack Hussein Obama's "47 million Americans can't get health insurance."
• Barack Hussein Obama's "650,000 jobs created or saved" by the $787 billion stimulus bill.

...and not an error bar in the lot.

The most annoying aspect of these PDOOMAs is how hard it is to get their promulgators to stand their ground and defend it. When challenged, they immediately change the subject, or attack the objector -- and subsequently act as if the PDOOMA went unchallenged, and should be taken as authoritative and trustworthy. But left-liberalism being inherently fraudulent and treacherous, perhaps this is only to be expected.

The proliferation of PDOOMAs on the subject of health care has slowed down somewhat in recent weeks, but there remain a couple that animate the Democrats' drive for the nationalization of American medicine. One is the "47 million uninsured" canard. No responsible analyst would propound such a figure without also stating how he'd arrived at it, what the error bar is, and whether factors other than the politically potent implication of unaffordability play a part in a significant fraction of the total. The last of those is a particularly important question at a time when among America's most important social ills is our problem with illegal immigration.

But no field beats "global warming / climate change" for reliance on the PDOOMA. The whole "discipline" is PDOOMAs from first to last. Global temperature assessment is inherently fraught with major uncertainties. Measurements of global temperature have error bars of several Centigrade degrees. The recent revelations of wholesale distortion and data-dredging at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, apparently carried on shamelessly by hundreds, if not thousands, of the best known "global warming" flacksters in the world, should be a lesson to us about the probity of "scientific measurements" advanced to serve a political cause. Self-nominated "scientists" are just as capable of deception, including self-deception, as any other human being...especially when vast quantities of money are at stake.