How low can the GOP go? The battered party is struggling with an identity crisis as millions of its members jump ship, and its scattered cast of current ‘leaders’ is making things even worse. The remarks that came out of Texas Rep. Joe Barton’s mouth on Tuesday morning illustrate the sort of dumbfounding stupidity – or perhaps willful refusal to accept the facts – that has come to define the Republican party.
Rep. Barton, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, claims that we shouldn’t be concerned at all about carbon emissions. After all, CO2 is in our Coca-Cola!
“It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, doesn’t cause cancer, doesn’t cause asthma… there’s nobody that’s ever been admitted to a hospital because of CO2 poisoning.” Stunning logic there, Congressman!
The Economist said it best:
Please don’t get me wrong, it’s not simply that Mr Barton is a climate-change sceptic. There are plenty of those and some make decent arguments against moving ahead with measures to control emissions. The problem with Mr Barton is that he is wholly uninterested in the science and statistics of the global warming debate. He is about as curious as a dead cat, as is his colleague in the Senate, James Inhofe.
Link [The Huffington Post] + [The Economist]
