Stupid right wing moochers

If there's a right wing thing I can't stand, it's when they use the Randian term "moochers", even if half in jest.   Anyone who has been a fan of Rand is automatically suspect, in my books; but to use her terminology just shows the continuing influence of a crank and a sympathy to her appalling lack of a social conscience.

But the funniest thing is when right wing starts "mooching" themselves.   Climate change fake skeptics are pretty expert at this.  Who can forget the request for money from the American family who ran into environmental problems with their feed lot in WA.    They blamed their alleged prominence in the climate change skeptic movement for their problems (never with any real evidence, as far as I could see.)   Promoted via Jonova and Watts Up With That, there appeared to be a lot of money pledged for their "save the farm" action, which may or may not be continuing, as they decamped back to the US anyway.

Now look at the latest example - Mark Steyn, who has stupidly decided to go out of his way to insult and defame Michael Mann on the pages of National Review Online, got full NRO support, which now publishes this ad:

Oh diddums?  More from their webpage:

As many of you know, National Review is not a non-profit — we are just not profitable. A lawsuit is not something we can fund with money we don’t have. Of course, we’ll do whatever we have to do to find ourselves victorious in court and Professor Mann thoroughly defeated, as he so richly deserves to be. Meanwhile, we have to hire attorneys, which ain’t cheap.

Righto.  So a publication that is making no profit decided to escalate a fight by challenging him to sue after they called him "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus" and approved this quote:

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.

What idiots.

Steyn and (much of) the Right in the US have become an intellectual embarrassment. 

And yes, it's affecting the Right as constituted in Australia:

South Australian senator Cory Bernardi, formerly Mr Abbott's parliamentary secretary, said: ''I do not think human activity causes climate change and I haven't seen anything that changes my view. I remain very sceptical about the alarmists' claims.''

Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce said the whole debate about whether humans were causing the climate to change was ''indulgent and irrelevant''.

The Coalition has a large fracture line within its ranks on this issue, and it has serious consequences on leadership and policy more broadly, since dismantling the Labor carbon "tax" and replacing it with the half baked Abbott scheme (which no economist supports as a better scheme for its intended purpose) will have  serious knock on budgetary consequences.   

It's the issue that poisons everything on the Right.