Gird your loins

Malkin:

Killing cap-and-tax won’t happen without massive resistance and persistence. Gird your loins and get on the phone next week.

Indeed. Gird your loins, Michelle.

And who better to demonstrate loin girding than Chris Horner:

So when the EPA got caught suppressing the sole substantive report submitted as part of its "internal deliberation" over whether and how to seize the energy sector of the U.S. economy, you knew ad hominem was sure to follow. In the Washington Times story about the suppressed report, we read that a spokeswoman for EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson — who made the determination that CO2 threatens the world — "noted that the memo's author, Alan Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist." Funny how people tasked with certain jobs become unqualified only when they are inconvenient.

Which is then followed by...wait for it...an ad hom attack!

Carlin is, indeed, a Ph.D. economist from MIT, a degree he obtained after earning a degree in physics from Cal Tech — both of which probably explain why he holds the job of reviewing such proposals. But this reflexive ad hom raises several obvious questions, none more obvious than: What makes Lisa P. Jackson a climate scientist? (She's a chemical engineer.)

For that matter, who the hell are Barack Obama, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, Nancy Pelosi, Carol Browner, Al Gore . . . need I continue? They all apparently are perfectly suited to reach informed judgment on the issue. Waxman is a scientist (bachelor's in political science, UCLA ‘61) like Batman's a scientist.

Given that now the criteria is that only Senator-scientists are allowed to propose and vote on any legislation involving any sort of science, we might ask whether Senator Inhofe--quoted in Michelle Malkin's post--is qualified to vote and gird loins against climate legislation. More Horner:

The alarmists, now joined by the Obama administration, are bullying, sneaking, dissembling, and on occasion openly lying to the public to get their way. You've got a little bit of time left to be outraged. My colleagues and I are flattered that so many people just assume we're handling these things, and the public can go about their lives. I have a life on the outside, too, with a wife and children. So, please, if this should come to be, don't call me. We told you.

I for one take pity upon senior fellows at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Tough life, I'm sure. Fighting in the trenches and girding loins for a pittance and no respect.