Kevin Drum explains why the whole climate scientists email scandal isn’t really a scandal…

As near as I can tell, ClimateGate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup. Among the stash of emails recently hacked from computers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, one mentioned a “trick” for producing a nice looking graph, but the word “trick” was plainly used in the sense of “technique,” not chicanery. There’s nothing questionable there. Another bunch of emails shows that when scientists are communicating privately they can be as catty and nasty as anyone else. It’s good gossip fodder, but nothing more. …

The problem is, Drum doesn’t get it: the right wing doesn’t need facts which rely on reason and make sense. They don’t care if it’s easily explicable in an innocent sense. And it is not just a matter of coal industry distortion or “fever swamp crowds.” This is the kernel at the heart of the right wing generating a myth. They don’t need no stinkin’ rationality.

All they need is even the slightest hint which can be intentionally distorted and hostilely interpreted in the worst way, and they’re set. That’s enough for them; that constitutes proof as far as they’re concerned. For them, the game is over, they have what they need, and no matter how many explanations and denials may be laid before them, they will from this time forward decide not the listen or believe, instead insisting that they have proof that climate change is a hoax. They will now trumpet this new truth from every orifice, on every news channel; every right-winger interviewed, every conservative writing on this will reference the “scandal” as if it were an established fact that climate change is something that scientists “tricked up.” So long as they can attach that to something real–the emails–they can then claim legitimacy, call it fact, and then obstinately insist that it’s simply there.

If you think I am exaggerating, then just look at the “Al Gore Said He Invented the Internet” myth, which the entire right wing still believes today–and for that matter, a majority of people everywhere believe. Same thing as the climate emails. There was an initial statement which could be taken two ways; they decided to take it the way that served their interests, the unflattering interpretation which was pretty clearly untrue; then they exaggerated it, then they spread the exaggerated lie as if it were truth. They did the trumpeting, the made the countless references, they claimed legitimacy, they insisted it was true. And now almost everybody believes it, even though it is easily and demonstrably false.

This is truthiness we’re talking about, folks.