Richard Land: Historian and Scientist

It seems that Richard Land is not just some Religious Right leader and pundit, he’s also something of a renaissance man with expertise in a wide variety of area – such as predicting the course of history where, in the future, George W. Bush will be hailed as one of our greatest president:

A prominent Southern Baptist leader has compared George W. Bush to Harry Truman, another president whose approval ratings dropped to the 20s in his final months in office but is now considered one of the greatest American presidents of the 20th century.

“Just remember that you heard it here from me,” Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said Dec. 6 on his weekly radio program. “He will be the Harry Truman of our time.”

Commenting on reports of a debate about whether Bush would go down as one of the worst presidents in the last 50 years, Land predicted that, like Truman’s, Bush’s legacy will be vindicated by the long scope of history.

That includes the president’s least popular decision, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While acknowledging the entry into war was handled poorly, Land said, the 2007 troop surge has placed the U.S.-led coalition on the cusp of victory of Iraq.

In addition to making America safer, Land applauded Bush for blunting “the metastasizing of abortion” by opposing late-term abortions and research using embryonic stem cells.

But Land isn’t stopping there and is likewise demonstrating a heretofore unknown scientific expertise as he explains that climate change is a total hoax:

Richard Land, head of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, called global warming a “hoax” and a “scam” on his weekly radio program Nov. 22.

Land attributed fluctuations in global temperature to “cycles of nature that God has allowed in the cosmos” and labeled human activity “a minor contribution to global warming.”

“The sunspots have faded, the solar cycle has peaked, the sun is going into a quiescent period and everybody but [former Vice President and anti-global warming activist] Al Gore is cooling off,” Land said.

Of course, it is not as if Land has a particularly good track record of making predictions regarding the issues he actually does know something about, as displayed by his repeated proclamations just over a year ago that Fred Thompson was a “Southern-fried Reagan” and that “to see Fred work a crowd must be what it was like to watch Rembrandt paint,” so it is probably best to take his current declarations with a grain or two of salt.