I wrote here about the recently emerged Cuccinelli Derangement Syndrome, as manifested by last Wednesday’s Washington Post editorial page: Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is an embarrassment for, inter alia, looking into fraud under an anti-fraud statute as opposed to putting climate science on trial. Huff huff, stomp stomp. Even since that recent day, however, the Syndrome has taken a turn — not for the better, particularly when you consider its sufferers are scientists, academics and journalists — such that the malady already requires an update.

First was Michael Mann weighing in mere days after the Post’s latest intemperance, complaining about Cuccinelli apparently putting climate science on trial, thereby disproving the rumor that WaPo does not allow dissenting views on climate orthodoxy to grace its pages. His effort is risible.

More revealing was Mann’s adaptation of the long-running line by CDS sufferers, that by enforcing a unanimously enacted anti-fraud statute, in the face of tremendous quantities of smoke indicating the possibility that fraud burned brightly behind it, Cuccinelli was stifling academic freedom. This line, however, is no longer operative after the silly argument was bounced by the judge who first ruled on the AG’s pre-investigation request for information, and readily abandoned at argument by the school in an effort to retain credibility even with an otherwise very sympathetic judge.

So, Mann tweaked the line to say the same thing not all that much differently: Cuccinelli following the law, by arguing that science and academia are not exempt from the laws, amounts to politics imposing on science. WaPo‘s edit page echoed this for emphasis in Sunday’s paper with a letter by a Michael J. McPhaden of (surprise!) Seattle, identified as president of the American Geophysical Union.

The intellectual bankruptcy is profound here, as the letter opens “I cheered Albemarle County Circuit Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr.’s August decision to reject Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II’s demand for private e-mails and other documents related to the research of a former University of Virginia professor who studied climate change”. Peatross in fact dismissed this very same argument as previously made and the school itself was too embarrassed to argue it. So, while he may cheer the decision, it does not seem that McPhaden can have actually read the decision.

Such is how the “climate” industry works, however. Argue and repeat what one feels, has heard or what has been decided, not what one actually finds.

The larger problem with this self-serving redoubt of even curioser intellectual robustness than its predecessor is its recklessness: under it, every action by an elected state attorney general or other law enforcement officer is a “political” one, per those against whom the law is being applied. He’s elected! Aha, politics! (See prior argument that they be exempt from the laws applying to the rest of us.)

Of course, teasing it out this also means every initiative by the elected Barack Obama, like using NASA to focus on global warming, is also a political one. The global warming industry wouldn’t want to establish such precedent were they not so bereft of arguments.

Still, so their adaptable campaign proceeds, as it will until we finally get to see what we have paid for and what parties are going to such great lengths to keep from us. Remember, Cuccinelli’s is in fact the sole independent inquiry into ClimateGate-related activities. The three self-exonerations to date would be decried had, say, BP instead cleared itself by such methods. but again, as with their eco-fascist snuff-films and other tactics, none of this is the sign of a movement confident of its arguments, or chances if the discussion depends upon one’s arguments.