Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli Pedals "Bum Dope" about Climate Scientist Dr. Michael Mann

[Secretary of State George P. Shultz] told Mr. Gorbachev that Moscow had been peddling ''bum dope'' on the subject [of AIDS]."---The New York Times (11-5-87)

This is a picture of Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli with his wife and seven children. I voted for Mr. Cuccinelli, but I won't be doing that again because I have realized that Attorney General Cuccinelli is a political thug who is wasting my taxes on a fishing expedition in order to defame the highly-regarded climate scientist Michael Mann and to frame him on cooked-up, politically-motivated fraud charges. There's nothing conservative about that!

See a recent Washington Post (7-13-10) article about this case and the 41-page brief which includes the email of the Deputy Attorney General Wesley Russell. Climate denialists love to read other folks' emails. Some denialists posted stolen emails on the server of a Russian Internet security company in Tomsk, Russia. [See "Climategate: A Russian Connection?"]

The Financial Times (4-15-10) reports:

There have been indications that the hackers could have been based in Russia, and some experts believe they may have been hired by sceptics based in the US.

How unfortunate that this father of seven cares more about protecting the interests of certain fossil fuel entities than about protecting the future of his beautiful children and the security of America and the world from the challenges of global warming.

There has been some mystery and some scandal about where Cuccinelli gets some campaign funds. Cuccinelli probably gets money from certain fossil fuel interests to promote global warming denialism, and maybe he hopes to ride the angry mob who have been duped by the global warming denialist movement to power. It would be better if Cuccinelli protected Virginia's great scientists and were a hero to his own and America's children and grandchildren.

In the former Soviet Union and in Russia, powerful politicians often defame and persecute scientists and spread pseudoscience. Most famously, the communist dictators called their crackpot ideology "scientific" Marxism-Leninism.

In today's Russia, the fossil fuel companies, especially the huge monopoly Gazprom, have enormous power. Russia is controlled by a ruling political party called Yedinstvo. It is very difficult for other parties to have access to the media. Investigative journalists are often murdered. Russia's President Medvedev is the former Chairman of the Board of Gazprom. The gas monopoly owns media outlets and has hired many former KGB officers.

When the so-called "Climategate" scandal happened, Western denialists appeared in the Russian press and on the Kremlin'sRussia Today T.V. and discredited British and American scientists. It reminded me a lot of the KGB's defamatory and destructive "AIDS made in America" propaganda campaign.

One Western denialist, the British crackpot Lord Christopher Monckton, told Russia Today T.V. that Russia was 20 times more democratic than Britain. because Russia was ruled by a Duma (the lower house of their Federal Assembly) and Britain was ruled by commissars of the European Union.

Monckton constantly mischaracterizes the views of the scientific authors that he quotes in his presentations. As Professor John Abraham commented after watching one of Monckton's performances:

I wrote to these authors and I read their papers. It turned out that none of the authors or papers made the claims that Monckton attributed to them. This pattern of misinterpretation was becoming chronic.

Recently, the "party line" in the Russian media may be shifting because the Russian media are carrying many accounts about global warming. In Russia, prominent scientists are admitting that the manipulation of ordinary people and even of political elites by pseudoscientific charlatans and the occult is a huge problem. Pseudoscience in Russia is eventually exposed and denounced, but not until considerable damage is done.

During the 1980s, the Soviet state security, the KGB, orchestrated the infamous "AIDS made in America" campaign of defamation against American scientists. In 1987, the famous Soviet physicist Roald Sagdeev, who recently criticized Attorney General Cuccinelli's persecution of climate scientist Michael Mann, publically denounced the pseudoscientific AIDS conspiracy theory. This may have happened because President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, George Shultz, told the Russians to stop spreading disinformation about how our scientists made AIDS.

Unlike Virginia's Attorney General Cuccinelli, America's Secretary of State Shultz, a Republican, defended America's scientists from those who would defame them and smear them in front of the whole world. Mr. Schultz appreciated how important American science is for the progress of the entire world.

Cuccinelli calls himself a "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about destroying American scientists and discrediting their research research with fabricated "fraud" charges. There is nothing conservative about risking the future of our nation and the whole world.

As the New York Times (11-5-87) reported:

Soviet scientists have disavowed charges in the Soviet-sponsored press that the AIDS virus was artificially cultivated at a secret American military base.

The scientists, Roald Sagdeyev and Vitali Goldansky, publicly distanced the Soviet Academy of Sciences from the accusations about American responsibility for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. They said they had protested the appearance of Soviet articles that repeated those contentions.

The disavowal was contained in Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, on Friday. The timing of the article by the scientists suggested that it had been written in response to complaints raised by Secretary of State George P. Shultz in an Oct. 23 meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, about Soviet discussion of the AIDS issue. Mr. Shultz told Mr. Gorbachev that Moscow had been peddling ''bum dope'' on the subject.

Charles Redman, a spokesman for the State Department, said the United States welcomed ''this authoritative Soviet disavowal of the false charges that the U.S. is responsible for the creation of the AIDS virus.''

''We note in particular that this disavowal appeared in the official Soviet press.''

A few years later, Izvestiya (3-19-92) famously reported:

[KGB chief Yevgeni Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists' 'crafty' plots were fabricated in KGB offices.

That was nice of the Russians to finally tell the truth, but they caused a lot of damage. Millions of people believed their lies about America, and millions of people distrusted our efforts to help them treat their disease.

Mr. Cuccinelli should follow the lead of the American statesman George Shultz, instead of toadying to the destructive sponsors of the pseudoscientific denialist movement. He should be defending scientists from persecution, not setting the mob on them at taxpayer expense.