David Brooks, a 1979 graduate of Radnor High School (Pa.) and the “conservative” columnist for the New York Times, has written a column about the growth of the tea party movement in which he expresses concern about how the ideas of the educated class have fallen from favor.

“The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting,” he said.

Now what Brooks is referring to “educated class” are people who have been certified as educated by self-proclaimed authorities, and their “education” consist mostly of why one must not question those authorities.

Most of that “educated class” does not know the Bible very well — think Howard Dean putting the Book of Job in the New Testament; and the ignorance extends to things like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and pretty much most of American History. A noted 1993 poll of Ivy League students showed that 75 percent of them couldn’t identify who defined democracy as “a government of the people, by the people and for the people”, and half of them didn’t know their senators.

Which gets us to “global warming”. The skepticism isn’t about global warming but about whether it is a crisis. There are plenty of people who are not certified as educated by self-proclaimed authorities yet have the brains to understand that  claims should be rejected out-of-hand when someone who has gained financially and politically  by making those claims  has been found not to be forthright in presenting his evidence.

Perhaps, Brooks should re-define his class as the sucker-that-can-be-seen-a-mile-away class.

And that gets us to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the story it ran Saturday in which it attempted to whitewash the deeds of  Michael Mann, the director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, whose emails were prominent among those leaked from East Anglia Climate Research Unit showing the entire movement to be an exercise in financially lucrative fear-mongering.

The Inky said:

Mann was affable and calm as he answered the assertions of his critics.The hardest part for him, he said, is having his integrity questioned. Scientists, he said, are “not trained to deal with these kinds of attacks.””My suspicion is, this has been orchestrated at a high level,” he said of the hacking.Behind his desk were a picture of his 4-year-old daughter and aplaque commemorating his contribution to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize,shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Mann was the lead author on the group’s 2001 assessment report.

No where does it mention that

— mention that data from East Anglia was destroyed.

— put in context that what Mann was advocating regarding the Climate Research Journal amounted to behind-the-scene censorship of legitimate dissenters.

— show that there was an attempt to distort data to fit the desired conclusion.  Here is an elaboration on what was being attempted

Here is a list of some of the more damning emails. Remember this group was trying to restrict your — not their own or Al Gore’s or Michael Moore’s — energy use, and make you  much poorer.

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Using style that would make Baghdad Bob proud, the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning covered the global warming scandal. The Inky put the stories on page 20. The headlines were “White House scientists defend climate data” and “Penn State professor: Research is sound”.

So what if dissenting views are squashed. So what if raw data is destroyed. So what if evidence is distorted so the desired conclusion is reached. Trust us, we are the Inquirer. There is no problem. We will welcome them with bullets and shoes.

Inky Still Mum On Global Warming Scam — Didn’t see a line in today’s (Nov. 25, 2009) Philadelphia Inquirer regarding the now five-day old story showing how respected proponents of the theory that man-made emissions are causing a catastrophic warming of the globe cooked the data to make their case.

And this is despite one of the central characters, Michael E. Mann, getting some of Pennsylania’s tax dollars funneled to him as the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State.