Speaking of Practices They Dislike

My previous post cites the environment — global warming, specifically — as a religiously founded cause that allows believers to dismiss complications to their unrelated aversions, especially business. National Review's Rich Lowry argues that John Edwards is seeking to capitalize on that underlying impulse:

It is rare indeed to hear a politician brag about his fistfights as a child as Edwards does to establish his credentials for the "epic fight" ahead. Persuasion and negotiations are anathema to him and he explicitly forswears them: "People say to me, as president of the United States I want you to sit at a table and negotiate with these people. Never." He's willing to talk to Iran, but not to Pfizer. One is only a terrorist-sponsoring enemy of the United States, after all, and the other is a drug company.

For all its populist grievance, Edwards has a certain conservative appeal based on filial piety. He brings up his grandparents and parents constantly, and frames his fight against corporations in terms of all the striving our forebears have done to secure a better future. He complains that the mill where his father worked has now closed. In a change election, Edwards sells a kind of nostalgia, as if fighting the corporations will end the capitalist churning that so discomfits his listeners.

Anybody know the amount of CO2 released by a nuclear explosion? Alackaday. Some there are, perhaps, who believe that Iran is fighting — albeit in a different manner — the "dark corporate forces [that] are responsible for everything [Edwards] doesn't like" in his "down-home Manichaean vision" (magnificent phrase).