Are wingnuts stupid, dishonest, or both?

It’s soooo easy to bamboozle a wingnut.

Just make up a semi-scientific-sounding quote, attribute it to people who never said it, and they lap it up like it was a triple fudge nut sundae.

Case in point: A recent opinion piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, by one James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, contains the following statement:

[Former Vice President Al] Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported, “Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame.”

This has been leapt upon by dozens of shrieking wingnut blogs, including Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Moonbattery, Cao’s Blog, and Flopping Aces, as some sort of “proof” that Gore is wrong. Cao, for instance, triumphantly bellows “It’s all a pile of horse hockey!” after reproducing the excerpt above.

There is, of course, one teeny little problem. James Taylor is lying.

As Tim Lambert has pointed out, Taylor’s quote does not appear in the article in the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate that discusses the Himalayan glaciers. (The full text of the article is available in PDF format, or see the HTML version in Google’s cache.) Search the article… you will not find the quotation in there anywhere.

So who is Taylor quoting? Why, he’s quoting James Taylor! That’s right: Taylor took the first line of an article he wrote himself back in November 2006, attributed it to an article that doesn’t contain that quote, and then claimed that the quote he himself manufactured bolsters the case against global warming. (Thanks to commenter Abe G at Tim Lambert’s site for catching this.)

And the wingnut bloggers who trumpeted this? They could have checked the sources Taylor cites and uncovered his lies as easily as anyone else — but they are either too stupid to do this, or they are perfectly happy to help spread these lies. Or both. Invariably, one finds that facts just plain do not matter to the likes of Misha, Cao, and their ilk. They much prefer being shills for lying propagandists like James Taylor. They positively flock to be shills for lying propagandists like James Taylor.

Remember this: Being dishonest is a way of life for the far right wingers. They see nothing wrong with lying to achieve their goals.