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Former Minnesota governor and 2012 presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty was for cap-and-trade and emissions reduction before he was against it. Inconsistent? Hypocritical? An example of throwing away his principles to pander to an ever more right-leaning base? Hardly, says Pawlenty: It’s just what the cool Republicans do these days.

Pawlenty: Everybody in the race, at least the big names in the race, embraced climate change or cap-and-trade at one point or another, every one of us, so there's no one who has been in executive position whose name is being bantered in a first or second-tier way who hasn't embraced it in some way.

Remember the old days, when a single change of heart — or an out-of-context quote — was all the leverage your opponent needed to paint you as dangerously unstable? That was of course before we discovered the unassailable Pawlenty Maxim: “But everyone else is doing it!” Tim, if everyone else jumped off a bridge into rising floodwaters from a storm made more severe by extreme climate fluctuations, would you jump too?

