Another:

Hi Jonah,
It is disappointing that you don’t even bother to refute Delong’s broad brush strokes. So I’ll do it for you:
1) Republicans want to control people: Yeah right. It isn’t the GOP that is coming up with college campus speech codes and trying to force private clubs (a la Augusta) to conform to their principles.
2) Republican politicians say they don’t believe in evolution: What on earth is he talking about? Sure there are some “religious right” Republicans that fit this, but it certainly isn’t the majority of the GOP (rank and file or leadership). Certainly most Republican pols will say they believe in God the Creator, but so do most Democrats. I can’t recall ever hearing a mainstream Republican denying evolution. Note to Delong: Belief in God does not equal denial of evolution.
3) Man-made CO2 is different from natural CO2: Again, WTF is he talking about? Global warming deniers (of which I am one) believe that man-made greenhouse gases make up a tiny fraction of all greenhouse gases (naturally occurring water vapor is the biggest one by far). If global warming is occurring, 1) it ain’t caused by man and 2) cutting CO2 emmissions back to 1990 (or for that matter 1890) levels would have a negligible effect on it. There are plenty of climatologists that will agree with those statements.
4) Republicans are tools of lobbyists and don’t listen to evidence: Now he sounds like your good friend, Chait. C’mon…anyone who thinks the GOP is any more or less beholden to “special interests” than Democrats has his head buried deep within the the confins of his backside.
5) Republicans don’t understand the importance of investment in education: I’m an engineer. I understand that spending more money on a failing system without fundamental reforms (like introducing competition) just makes it fail more spectacularly. When we are spending an average of $10K per student in the public school system and the average graduate can’t do basic math or understand the scientific method at its simplest levels, it doesn’t take a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Engineering from Penn State and a 3.7 GPA to realize that the public education system is failing. It doesn’t take a 10 years of experience in software developement with companies like Raytheon and EDS to understand that our college campuses have become less centers of education and more centers of liberal indoctrination.
Delong’s statements are completely ridiculous. Very few engineers that I know would agree with his 5 statements. Probably because all the ones I know left the campus and got real jobs. The ones he knows probably were too scared to enter the real world where one must produce something of value to earn one’s bread…
I get the feeling from people like him that some people (both liberal and conservative) harbor misconceptions of their political opposites and base all their views on those absurd misconceptions.