Forget all that crapola about principled conservatives versus the backsliding Republicans corrupted by Washington. The VRWC is a single network of corruption, fueled by corporate cash, and with no shreds of intellectual integrity left. The Guardian:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Hey, I wonder what Condi thinks about this? She's the one with an Exxon oil tanker named after her.

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

This is an especially classy touch. Cocktail Wienies!

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees

It's all one cesspool: the Bush administration, the conservative movement, the corporations. This is conservatism, and it has failed.

And here's what the slippery little cocktail-wienie chomping scut who's very well paid to produce this shit:

he letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar...

(One of the many conservative abuses I will never "get over" is the degradation of the word "scholar" to mean propagandist.)

...at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

Ah. And the $10,000 is there to assure independence. Now I understand.

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," [Green] said.

Yeah, it is, isn't it? There's the side that has to pay people $10,000. And then there's the side that doesn't. Why would that be, I wonder?

"One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."

Anyone who doubts that there's a single VRWC (emergent or not) with a single set of talking points should read that paragraph again. This scholar, this clown, this asshat is collecting big fat checks to apply political ideas like being Centrist or Moderate to scientific issues.

"Damn, the debate about gravity is so polarized." And so what?

NOTE I don't see this story in Pravda on the Potomac or Izvestia on the Hudson. How odd. Or not. Keep those wienies coming!