Thursday, November 18, 2010

South Carolina Republican Blasts His Party's Know-Nothingism

Who is this man? Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), rated by the American Conservative Union as 93% pure conservative, yet a Congressman who takes global climate change science seriously and who was defeated in his primary because of it ... by a tea party ignoramus who doesn't believe in science but who does believe in certain birther myths.

What did this man do yesterday? At a House subcommittee hearing on climate change, and from the vantage point of no longer giving a good goddamn whose toes he steps on because he'll be out of office in a matter of weeks, lectured his dumber-than-dirt colleagues about two things coming down the track: global climate change and the dominance of the new green technology by China:
"...we're here with important decisions to be made. And I would also suggest to my Free Enterprise colleagues -- especially conservatives here -- whether you think it's all a bunch of hooey, what we've talked about in this committee, the Chinese don't. And they plan on eating our lunch in this next century. They plan on innovating around these problems, and selling to us, and the rest of the world, the technology that'll lead the 21st century. So we may just press the pause button here for several years, but China is pressing the fast-forward button. And as a result, if we wake up in several years and we say, 'geez, this didn't work very well for us. The two doctors [industry-paid skeptics of global warming] didn't turn out to be so right. 98 [scientists who do see global climate change coming] might have been the ones to listen to....

"There are people who make a lot of money on talk radio and talk TV saying a lot of things. They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and they're experts on climate change. They substitute their judgment for people who have Ph.D.s and work tirelessly [on climate change]."

Meanwhile, all of the Republicans vying to chair the House Energy Committee -- which handles climate and energy issues -- in the new Congress are climate change deniers. They include Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), who infamously apologized to BP shortly after the company's catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last summer, and 87-year-old Texas Republican Rep. Ralph Hall, the leading candidate to take the gavel in the next Congress. Congressman Hall took a potshot at the White House's use of the term "global climate disruption" and said that "reasonable people have serious questions about our knowledge of the state of the science."

These are some of the same folks who want "creationism" taught in the public schools, along with "abstinence only."

Idiocracy ain't just a wildly improbable comic movie any longer.

6 comments:

Liberal POV said...

Guy


Are you and your Tea Party Mob reading this?

2012 IS COMING said...

Yeah...well, see....the way these election things work is kinda like this.

When almost 80 % of the voters in a congressional district prefer the 'other guy'....then the 'other guy' wins. It doesn't matter what Watuaga Watch has to say. They don't get to vote in SC elections.

brotherdoc said...

Jesus is coming before the world gets too warm, according to these climate change deniers. Of course, those who don't care about their neighbors (the poor, needy, and powerless, the "least of these," who will suffer most from global warming), are likely to spend their eternity in a lot warmer place.

Opinionated said...

Well-said, brotherdoc!

Anonymous said...

There is global warming and cooling. It just isn't influenced by man's activities. That hoax has been debunked to all those that look at facts instead of taking it on liberal political faith.

BikerBard said...

Wow. I'd be anonymous too if I were that ignorant!