This is one of those times when I’m hating on the we/they continuum. Ugh. While some Republican leaders sorta-kinda hedge on all the socialist-Hitlerite-Stalinist rhetoric of incoherence, it’s important to remember actually who these people and what their beliefs are.
Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly highlighted this gem from Joe Barton (R-Texas) last week.
“Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.”
When do you begin to question whether some actually believes what they say they do? As Benen pointed out, this guy has senatorial ambitions. Does he ever. This ‘thinking’ ties all the healthcare scaremongering to global warming denial with silly string. But when you try to gnaw into the string, to perhaps free its captives, the string tastes like… burning.