From Think Progress
Last month, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) announced that he would travel to Copenhagen in December to act as a climate skeptic “truth squad” during international climate change treaty negotiations. “I think somebody has to be there — a one-man truth squad,” Inhofe said on CSPAN. Today, on Bill Bennett’s radio show, Inhofe revealed that his delegation has expanded to “a truth squad of three”:
BENNETT: And John Barrasso’s going with you, right? John Barrasso?
INHOFE: Yeah, Barrasso and there’s another secret person going with me. We’re going to have a team of three, a truth squad of three.
Listen here:
When Inhofe first announced his plans for a “truth squad,” TPM’s Eric Kleefeld remarked, “It’s nice to see how seriously foreign policy is taken these days — when a member of the political minority will send his own delegation to an international conference, in order to undermine the government and tell other countries that they can’t work with the United States.” Now it’s at least two members of the political minority.
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This is strictly a stunt for the American media. The delegates at Copenhagen are serious people, and will treat Inhofe’s delegation as if they were the Three Stooges.
Do they get to go on the tax payers dime? Those A-holes block funds for family planing all the time. Is there not some kind of reciprocity here???
Inhofe will be in Europe as a minor foreign politician.
Basicly a nobody.
With any luck somebody with international importance will pointedly and very publicly call him an idiot to his face.
Tear a strip off him and flog him with it.
I was telling my wife about this today, about the “three man truth squad”, because I wanted to tell her about the Three Stooges remark (very funny!).
I started to tell her about Inhofe, meaning to describe him as “that anti-global warming” guy.
When I said “anti-…” she finished the word for me by saying “Antichrist?”
I said, “well, no, kind of a runner-up in the Antichrist sweepstakes” which made her giggle.
It’s hard to imagine a very warm welcome for Inhofe and Barrasso in Copenhagen, as the people above have commented.
It might even be worth filming.
About Barrasso, there was a kind of weird incident in the Senate hearings, during which he suddenly started to talk about the hundreds of thousands of acres of dead trees, killed by the bark beetle, in Wyoming. He wanted to get the assurance of other Senators that the timber industry should be able to harvest these dead trees without environmental regulatory interference.
So Barrasso really does seem to “get it”, at least on some level and I think he must consciously know that he is lying. Yet, at hearing after hearing, he just sits there and incessantly spouts denier talking points. Is this part of the Newt Gingrich ethic, in which Gingrich criticized Harry Reid for not being a good enough liar?
Do these guys believe what they say? Are they victims or perpetrators?
Would they deliberately assist in possibly destroying the biosphere in return for financial assistance with their careers, if they really knew what was at stake?
There’s a science fiction story, I think by C.M. Kornbluth, called “The Marching Morons” about a conman from the past that helps con the mentally challenged moronic general population into cooperating with their own extinction. More and more, the Denier tactics remind me of that story.
Will the Republican faithful turn against their leaders when they discover how badly and callously they’ve been used?
Probably not, sad to say.
It’s all kind of baffling.