OK, I'll do the honours this time and post the obvious. Since it's gotten just short of 44,000 views on YouTube, there must be plenty of you who still haven't seen this video - though a Google Blogs search suggests some 80 blogs or so have already written about Rep. John Shimkus these past couple of days.
Shimkus spoke at a hearing of the US House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment on climate change, and this is what came out (h/t The Plank):
A scary kind of funny, a funny kind of scary, you tell me.
Arguing for the latter is a detail that some of the more alert commenters noted. It is rather odd, isn't it, to hear Shimkus repeatedly intone how he considers the scripture he quoted "the infallible word of God" -- and then, in the very sentence after declaring God's word "infallible, unchanging, perfect", raise the issue that ... hey, in any case, back "in the age of the dinosaurs" there were more carbon parts in the atmosphere than there are now. So njema problema, right?
That, of course, is right when he mentions that "there is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet." I'm sure the men of faith on the panel were sorry that Shimkus never did get the chance to "get into the theological discourse" about the scriptures he quoted.
A blogger called Dale Oregon has a point to make too. Shimkus reassures us that the end of the world will only come when God wills it, and man will not be able to bring it about. But is anyone claiming that CO2-driven climate change threatens to bring about "the earth's end," Oregon asks? Or even just to destroy "all living creatures", to go with Shimkus's choice of scripture? Let's take the man's word for it here, and assume that "summer and winter, day and night will never cease". What's the corollary here?
[It] brings to mind the excluded middle fallacy nested in the middle of Rep. Shimkus's impressively dense catalog of fallacies: is there, perhaps, something short of The World's Complete Ending that's worth worrying about? Anything?
The above video is not all. For more Shimkus weirdness from the panel, do check out Matthew Yglesias's post from Saturday. If stupid has a face and a voice, then it looks and sounds something quite like John Shimkus.
(In case you were wondering, the posh English guy on the panel in the video Yglesias posted, who at least has mastered the art of seeming authoritative, is Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, as commenter #38 helpfully points out. The Viscount is "a British politician and business consultant, policy advisor, writer, and inventor" who back in the day was one of Margaret Thatcher's policy advisors - and who made waves shortly afterward when he suggested quarantaining all AIDS carriers for life. Classy.)
Shimkus is no newbie in the House, by the way. He represents the voters of Illinois's 19th district, a sprawling rural and suburban district in the south of the state, and was first elected in 1997. He received 64% of the vote last year, but then this is a district that went to Bush in 2004 by 61% to 39%.
