Michele Bachmann brought up a very good point recently: why don’t politicians understand the clear messages god sends to us through weather events?
While she appears to have been joking, it’s the humor of someone who believes god is actively involved in world affairs, urged her into her career choices, and regularly speaks to commoners. In her world, hurricanes increase in frequency not because of climate change–which there is no evidence for–but when god has policy disagreements with Washington–which is just plain true if you look at the facts.
While extreme weather attributed to climate change can be easily explained as the prime communication method of a vengeful god, that still leaves harmful things like smog, which is most certainly caused by man. Bachmann doesn’t see any need to regulate things like that and thoughtfully proposed abolishing the EPA to create jobs. (For polluters and manufacturers of oxygen masks, I suppose.)
Unfortunately for the people in America who will continue to die from smog pollution, the Democratic president is pathologically obsessed with making concessions to people like Bachmann who don’t believe in science or sound economic theory, which is why he reversed course on smog regulations. One of the only things he has left to concede is the presidency itself, which at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see him offer up.
Wednesday: Rubble Speech Revisited
My (slightly bemused) worry is that I see a number of people on the right, the Bachman types, seeing your cartoon and celebrating it as a result of the irony and sarcasm being simply to subtle for them to possibly understand. The narrative looks exactly like what they were (un-ironically) thinking already.
I had a significant other who was foreign, and as such she didn’t quite understand the depths of American socially acceptable insanity. She used to think my ultra-right-wing grandfather was hilariously witty until one day when I pointed out that everything he said was actually dead-serious and not intended for comedic effect. I probably shouldn’t have told her that. I imagine it was the equivalent of telling a little kid that Santa Claws isn’t real, pe rse, but that there is a fat man who comes down chimneys in response to the presence of children in a domicile but that he has a VERY different agenda.
From http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe%27s_Law: “Poe’s Law is an axiom suggesting that it’s difficult to distinguish between parodies of religious fundamentalism (or, more generally, parodies of any crackpot or extremist belief) and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane.”
Poe’s Law huh? Thanks for that. As Bill Grifith once said (paraphrased), “everything has a word [or a name]” I just really like knowing what they are. I don’t think I’ll forget Poe’s law, but sadly that will probably be because I will keep needing it to describe what I see on an increasing basis.
I see you have been duped by the anthropogenic smog creation myth pushed by money-grubbing super rich scientists who drain the national budget to fuel their insatiable lust for Lamborghini demolition derbies.