George Will, Crank

As others in the Left Blogosphere have reported, George Will's recent opinion piece in the Washington Post regarding "Global Cooling" is so bad, so ridden with simple errors, that it signals Will's departure from serious opinion. A crank is born every day, and George Will is today's crank baby. Like a forgetful uncle, Will is repeating the same falsehoods over and over, and counting on people's indulgence and poor memory to save him.

Brad Johnson has looked at the matter in greater detail:

Conservative leading light George F. Will recently penned a column claiming global warming is a “hypothetical” calamity. In “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will attacked Secretary of Energy Steven Chu for discussing a worst-case scenario of California drought caused by the decimation of Sierra snowpack, falsely claiming Chu predicted this will come to pass “no later than 10 years away.” Will also incorrectly claimed that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979″ — based on a 45-day-old blog post by Daily Tech’s Michael Asher, one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers.

Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word.