The title of this work comes from a quote made by Ronald Reagan as he was campaigning against Jimmy Carter during his Presidential campaign in 1980. He was speculating that Mt. St. Helen's volcano, which had erupted a few months earlier, was responsible for emitting more sulfur dioxide than were human sources. Reagan was wrong in his assumption, but as the author points out he doesn't get a free pass simply for prefacing his comments with a disclaimer that he's "not a scientist", nor do any of the politicians who have uttered it since whenever they want to dismiss climate science.
There are many other examples in the book of politicians cherry picking data, and sometimes even facts, to make their cases about things from why we should stop undocumented immigration to why Planned Parenthood should be shut down. What I found most interesting in all this was that in some cases they apparently did understand the math and science enough to know that they had to look for very specific data points (in some cases only one) which ironically meant that they did understand, but were counting on their audience not to.
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