Abbreviated pundit round-up: Deadly Sandy gives campaigning politicians a chance to show leadership

Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post:

The 2012 presidential election is fundamentally a contest between our future and our past. Barack Obama's America is the America that will be; Mitt Romney's is the America that was. And the distance between the two is greater, perhaps, than in any election we've had since the Civil War. [...]

Two Americas are facing off in next week's election. By their makeup, the Democrats are bound to move, if haltingly, into the future, while the Republicans parade proudly into the pre-New Deal past'some of it mythic, lots of it ugly. The differences could not be clearer.

Thomas L. Friedman at The New York Times:

Note to President Obama: Klobuchar built that lead by combining a moderate liberalism with a pro-business, pro-jobs agenda and a pragmatic problem-solving approach. All of Klobuchar's campaign ads are positive, and many feature Republican business leaders explaining why they are voting for her. Most Minnesota voters 'want their politicians to be problem-solvers, not ideologues,' Klobuchar said to me. Senator Al Franken, who's also laser-focused on jobs, boasted to me that Minnesota is now 'The Silicon Valley of windows,' because of all the high-tech window manufacturers here. Franken, who's also a St. Louis Park native, added, 'Minnesota wants its politicians to operate on principles, but if one of your principles is to never compromise, they don't want that.'

Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times asks why there is no "feeding frenzy" in the damned liberal media over Benghazi. It's not a conspiracy, he says. And then he says it is.

Stanley Crouch at the New York Daily News says women at the polls are going to make Republicans pay:

[N]ext Tuesday, radical Republicans will be surprised if they think American women will let them get away with what they have said and what they believe: about rape, contraception, equal pay. They can deny all they want, but it is all on the public record, the crazy statements of Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock and all the rest.

Hiding behind their faith, these zealots have sought to take away the very rights women fought for throughout the long, hard decades of the 20th century.

In this camp are also Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan'no matter how much they deny it.

Erwin Chemerinsky at the Los Angeles Times says an Obama election victory could mean a liberal Supreme Court majority for the first time in more than 40 years. A Romney win would mean an even sharper drive to the right that could destroy everything from affirmative action to abortion rights:

Although much less visible, presidential elections also determine the composition of the lower federal courts. The vast majority of cases are never heard by the Supreme Court. Last year, the high court decided only 65 cases out of almost 10,000 petitions for review. In the overwhelming majority of cases in federal courts, it is the appeals courts that get the last word. Federal district court and court of appeals judges also have life tenure and often remain on the bench for decades. There has been a huge difference between Democratic and Republican appointees in areas such as individual liberties, civil rights and access to the courts.

Bob Keeler at Newsday:

Finally, an important government official saying the truth about our planet. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has been on top of the detailed preparations for Hurricane Sandy and the recovery, rose above the nitty-gritty reality of the moment to speak a stark, important truth that our two presidential candidates would do well to hear.

"There has been a series of extreme weather incidents," the governor said at a news conference on Tuesday as officials discussed the aftermath of the storm. "That is not a political statement. That is a factual statement. Anyone who says there's not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think is denying reality.'

The reality, of course, is that the warming of the planet is changing the climate in ways that will continue to spawn freakish weather events. It's the new normal. Get used to it.

Maureen Dowd at The New York Times:

Gov. Chris Christie, the fleece-wearing, order-barking Neptune of the Jersey Shore, was all over TV Tuesday, effusively praising the president for his luminous leadership on Hurricane Sandy, the same president he mocked last week at a Romney rally in Virginia as a naif groping to find 'the light switch of leadership.' [...]

Rather than campaigning, which he finds draining, the president was in the Oval calling a Republican to work things out. But this time, unlike with John Boehner at a fateful moment, a flattered Christie took Obama's calls. While Romney campaigns in Florida Wednesday, Christie and Obama plan to tour storm damage in New Jersey, a picture of bipartisanship, putting distressed people above dirt-slinging politics.

William Pitt Rivers, writing at Truthout while the storm raged:

Since last Tuesday, about 200 people have kept a round-the-clock vigil to protest the absence of climate change from the political conversation. Today, Hurricane Sandy forced an end to that vigil. Meanwhile, in all the wall-to-wall coverage of the storm on all the major "news" networks, there has been no mention I have seen of the elephant blowing through the room.

The climate is coming down around our ears, and neither big-dollar candidate has felt compelled to date to deign to bring it up, because this is America. We're a funny lot, in that we must be led to the edge of the precipice and then kicked in the back before saying, "Wow, this is dangerous, we should do something about this!"

The lights just flickered, and the wind is picking up, so I have to submit this before everything shuts down.

A metaphor, that.

George Lakoff at Huffington Post Green:

Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy'and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let's say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation. [...]

There is a difference between systemic and direct causation. Punching someone in the nose is direct causation. Throwing a rock through a window is direct causation. Picking up a glass of water and taking a drink is direct causation. Slicing bread is direct causation. Stealing your wallet is direct causation. Any application of force to something or someone that always produces an immediate change to that thing or person is direct causation. When causation is direct, the word cause is unproblematic.

Systemic causation, because it is less obvious, is more important to understand.

Mark Hertsgard at The Nation:

Sandy is short for Cassandra, the Greek mythological figure who epitomizes tragedy. The gods gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy; depending on which version of the story one prefers, she could either see or smell the future. But with this gift also came a curse: Cassandra's warnings about future disasters were fated to be ignored. That is the essence of this tragedy: to know that a given course of action will lead to disaster but to pursue it nevertheless.

And so it has been with America's response to climate change. For more than twenty years, scientists and others have been warning that global warming, if left unaddressed, would bring a catastrophic increase in extreme weather'summers like that of 2012, when the United States endured the hottest July on record and the worst drought in fifty years, mega-storms like the one now punishing the East Coast.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

It's really hard to envision any way that we're going to seriously cut back on greenhouse gas emissions until the effects of climate change become obvious, and by then it will be too late. I recognize how defeatist this is, and perhaps the proliferation of extreme weather events like Sandy will help turn the tide. But it hasn't so far, and given the unlikelihood of large-scale global action on climate change, adaptation seems more appealing all the time. For the same reason, so does continued research into geoengineering as a last-resort backup plan.

I'd like someone to persuade me I'm wrong, though.