Here’s a picture of incoming House member Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) who is taking over Roy Blunt’s old seat.
(PoliticMo Photo/Blake James)
That seems about right, although to be the perfect poster-boy for the Class of 2010 he really should be yelling. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Mr. Long doesn’t believe in global warming or man-caused climate change. Check that. It’s not hard to confirm.
3) To what extent are you worried about climate change and how do you think Congress should respond to the issue?
There’s always changing and nobody really knows if it has anything to do with man or not. The science I’ve [seen] says it does not. What I do know is that I wouldn’t pass any kind of energy tax that’s going to wreck our economy and cause job losses. We’ve got nearly 10 percent unemployment, and passing a bill like that is something that will cause more job loss and more jobs to be shipped overseas. Farmers in particular I think 61 percent of their overall cost is related to energy in one way or the other whether it’s gas, diesel, fertilizer, electric. I’m not going to stand for something like cap and trade.
The dude really does have it all, as Fired Up Missouri is amply documenting. I particularly love his bitching about taking a pay-cut and ethics requirements. I’m sure he’ll be a real winner on the Transportation and Homeland Security committees. At least we’ll know that fuel efficiency standards won’t be improving any time soon.
It really is remarkable to realize that it is no longer possible for a Republican office seeker to admit that humans might be screwing up the climate in ways that will be inhospitable to our current dwelling patterns or even our lives. And it really is a recent development. McCain and Palin campaigned on a Cap and Trade policy. Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, and Huckabee have all acknowledged climate change as a problem requiring some government action in recent years.
How do they plan on dealing with that history?
“They’re in an odd place,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told POLITICO. “They better have an explanation, an excuse or a mea culpa for why this won’t happen again.”
I liked Steve Benen’s reaction:
Yes, in Republican circles in 2011, those who don’t reject the scientific consensus on the climate crisis will be rejected out of hand. Those who’ve been even somewhat reasonable on the issue in recent years should expect to grovel shamelessly — a trait that’s always attractive in presidential candidates.
Nietzsche once had something to say about ugliness and criminality.
“The anthropologists among the criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo.”
I don’t know if today’s scientists would agree, but I believe a deranged soul does often manifest itself visually in someone’s face. I don’t know why anyone would want to be a public servant so badly that they would deny climate change to get the money and approval they need to get elected. But I know that anyone who would do that (and any party that would do that) is monstrous.
Those freshmen who don’t already look like Billy Long may find they look a little more like him with each passing year. Selling your soul to the devil exacts that kind of price.