This is, of course, excellent news for conservatives:
In the best example yet of the GOP’s total disconnection from reality, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) called hearings on climate science, and the Republican Party chose as their sole “expert” witness — quack non-scientist ranting loon Lord Christopher Monckton, also known as a frequent guest on the utterly insane Alex Jones web/radio show.
Good grief. Good freaking grief.
Via CNN, he looks like a cross between a deformed Michael Caine and Marty Feldman:
I think DougJ is right about that Pale Fire hypothesis.
And you really need to watch it for a few minutes. For me, the accent pulls the entire performance together, although a seer sucker suit might have been an added touch. I felt like I was watching a Gene Wilder movie or almost half expected Christopher Guest to make a cameo.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
You gotta admit though, wingnuts got some purdy graphs. They may be bogus as a Luntz dictionary, But they be fancy, fer sure./
licensed to kill time
My flabber, it is ghasted. Of course Lord Monckton will get equal time on the Nooz, he’s a Lord!
feebog
Well, he has his stichk down pretty well. Keep talking, use distored data, and keep pushing out the word salad. I also love the fact that he admits not being a scientist up front, but rather a “policy maker”.
A Ghost To Most
when did Little Green Footballs stop being completely crazy?
jethro
Monckton may be a fabulist, but he has some sort of medical condition that affects his eyes. It’s much more productive to focus on his quack theories than mock his appearance.
Mark S.
Couldn’t they at least get this asshole?
beltane
Brilliant move by the GOP. It is impossible to debate a lunatic, and so they bring a lunatic to the debate.
Liberals bring paper mache puppets to protests, while conservatives have transformed themselves into human paper mache puppets. The Republicans have become so avant garde they might as well be French. From the Daddy party to the Dada party.
beltane
@A Ghost To Most: About three months ago.
Citizen_X
This gives me the opportunity to repost this:
255 members of the National Academy of Sciences have published a letter in Science defending climate science. It starts out, “We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular.”
Seriously, I think they’re tired of being punching bags for idiots.
balconesfault
Could you see what would happen to a discussion on, say, the condition of our nuclear arsenal, if the Republicans rolled out a number of nuclear scientists and physicists and engineers from the US who all testified to a need for more spending for upgrades and maintenance … and the Democrats presented one nattily dressed British guy who opined “I’m not a scientist but I’m good with policy, and here’s why I think all their data on how the arsenal is degrading below the point where it represents a functional deterrence should be ignored”.
scav
@licensed to kill time: But is your gob smacked?
DonkeyKong
What til he tells congress that oil is indeed chocolate milk and it is delicious!
licensed to kill time
@scav:
Smacked right in the ol’ gobberoo. My timbers are shivered and bones rattled, too.
c u n d gulag
The minute he said he’s not an expert, someone should have asked him, “Well, WTF are you wasting our time here, you bug-eyed little dufus?”
I just wonder who borrowed his soap-box at the park while he ‘testified?
BTW – Marty Feldman was one of the funniest people on the planet. They cried when he died.
When Lord Monckton passes, people will cheer. And, if there’s still Oxygen on this planet, they will laugh until they soil themselves.
What a putz!!!
El Cid
How dare you peasants insult the Discount’s Earl of Peter Benchley’s Monk’s Tongue? He has a self-earned degree — in Science!
El Cid
Testimony of one Abraham Simpson, on global warming, invited by Congressional Republicans:
demo woman
Tomorrow US Postal Service will pick up canned goods for the local food pantry. You can help out by putting a few can goods either in your mail box or in a bag next to your mail box. Most donations at food pantries are down and the pantries depend on this once a year drive. If you post on another site, please mention this.
Tsulagi
You nailed that one. I’d say 20/80 Caine/Feldman after some binge eating.
Can see why the Goopers would go with Lord Monckton. He has a British accent so he must be smart. Apparently likes pink shirts so that reaches out toward another closet touchstone with the teabaggers.
Today’s GOP: The Most Trusted Name in Stupid.
Elisabeth
@demo woman:
Thanks for the reminder.
Unfortunately, because people put free stuff out front all the time here, it would be gone long before the postal guy ever showed up. I wonder if he’d come to the apartment to pick it up?
Monkeyfister
Someone please tell me his eyes are CG. They remind me of “Large Marge,” or Christopher Lloyd’s villain in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”
“Damn my eyes!” Igor, “Yound Frankenstein
–mf
mistersnrub
Shorter Monckton: “What hump?”
Origuy
Tsulagi beat me to it. The British accent makes it sound like he’s narrating a BBC documentary, so he must know what he’s talking about.
Svensker
Go to around 53 minutes when Sensenbrenner (sp?) starts interrogating the tree ring scientist and pretty much flat out calls her and all the others liars. AND says that Fox News wouldn’t have let the Brit scientists get away with their shenanigans! She restrains herself, barely.
On the one hand, scientists with Ph.D.s from schools like Harvard and Stanford, on the other hand, Lord Monckton and Sensenbrenner. Pretty much the Dem/Repub divide these days in an ugly nutshell.
While I’ll be happy to mock the Monckton idiot, the fact that he is an ugly fuck with likely thyroid disease is not mockable.
SarahLoving
@Monkeyfister: dude, totally. although i was thinking more along the lines of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
pseudonymous in nc
@Citizen_X:
I think they’re tired of being forced to spend a good chunk of every single fucking day dealing with trolls. I don’t think that research science should have some elevated status, but I also think that the basic principles of research science are very susceptible to bad-faith attacks from fuckwits. I don’t expect to be able to stand behind people at their desks — even if I indirectly pay their wages — and say ‘what’s that for? explain this! why are you doing that?’
S. cerevisiae
He reminds me more of this:Upper Class Twit of the Year
Calouste
Not surprising that the neo-feudalist party gets a hereditary Lord to argue its points.
soonergrunt
He could’ve saved everyone a LOT of time and trouble just by playing an MP3 of The Coconut Song by Rowan Atkinson.
EJ
@jethro: It’s Graves’ Disease – hence the Marty Feldman reference.
Bill
I have no idea what any of this means:
“quack non-scientist ranting loon Lord Christopher Monckton, also known as a frequent guest on the utterly insane Alex Jones web/radio show.”
and this sounds petty:
“he looks like a cross between a deformed Michael Caine and Marty Feldman”
What does this post look like to a conservative?
me
LGF gets a whole hell of a lot of comments!
Older
@Elisabeth: You can take it to the Post Office, Saturday or Monday.
MobiusKlein
@Svensker: looked at the 53 minute mark – do congress critters always end their questioning by asking long winded rhetorical questions and not allow the person being questioned a chance to get a word in?
Quiddity
None of you goofballs get it. He’s LORD Monckton, and should be deferred to on just about any topic. Here is is, after a grueling flight (in First Class) over the Atlantic, donating his precious time to help us dumb Americans. We should be thankful – extremely thankful – towards this fine fellow.
Keithly
Huh, an English peer with a disease that has a powerful hereditary component. Never saw that one coming.
The Truffle
@A Ghost To Most: I was wondering the same thing. I know Charles Johnson made his “Goodbye Cruel Wingnutosphere” announcement a few months ago, but he sounds almost reality-based here.
The Truffle
@me: Good gawd, is LGF going all Balloon Juice on us?
El Cid
Committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) finally intervened. “Would you agree to let the Vice President answer your questions?” Inhofe said Gore could respond when he was done talking, but Boxer wouldn’t have it: “No, that isn’t the rule. You’re not making the rules. You used to when you did this. Elections have consequences. So I make the rules.”
Mumphrey
I have to object to the denigration of seersucker. I’m a big fan of seersucker, and I break out my seersucker suit about now every year.
And to bring up somemthing utterly random, do you Balloon Juice guys have any say in which ads pop up on this site? Every time I come to Balloon Juice from another site, some asshole screams, “Congratulations! You’ve just been selected to receive a $1000 walmart gift card!” at me. It comes on really loud, and when I hit the mute button on my computer, which I do as soon as the guy gets to “-grat-“, the mute won’t kick in until he’s done yelling at me. If there is some way you could drop this ad, I’d be mch obliged. It would be bad enough if it were some company I don’t loathe, but It’s fucking walmart. Ugh.
Jennifer
I kept waiting for the giant Monty Python foot to drop down and squash him.
Jager
His lawyer looked a bit like Benny Hill
Comrade Kevin
It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.
Bill D.
I was one of Dr. Graumlich’s students back in 1988 at UCLA. She trained me in dendrochronology, and she introduced me to the paper on jump dispersal of western conifers by Philip V. Wells that led me down the path of scientific inquiry which eventually resulted in my thesis. She has one of the finest minds I’ve ever known, is a person of great integrity, and is a scientist not an ideologue. In the video you can see her passion for her work come out as she relates her observations of foxtail pines in the Sierra.
My response to Mr. Sensenbrenner is unprintable, but I am seething at these ignorant bastards who imagine they are serving the cause of truth.
Dr.BDH
He’s the Christopher Hitchens/Andrew Sullivan of climate change deniers. It’s the accent that makes Americans go all loosey-goosey in the cerebrum. But spread a buttery layer on bullshit, it’ still bullshit.
SpaceSquid
On behalf of my countrymen, I would like to apologise unreservedly for the conduct of Lord Monkton (a man, lest we forget, who once demanded there should be compulsory countrywide HIV screenings followed by mandatory quarantine for anyone found to be HIV positive). I would also like to request, somewhat selfishly, that you don’t send him back.
Fearguth
If not Marty Feldman, at least a chameleon.
teejay
“This is, of course, excellent news for conservatives”.
Wow, does anyone have an idea on the shelf life of this line? I’m thinking maybe bomb shelter status. It seems like it’ll live forever. The line that keeps on giving.
Brutus et tu
Monckton seems to think that eating more merde is ok because a little bit of merde is going to be ate anyway.
themann1086
The scientific community is pretty fucking tired of the games played by the Right. The sungazing hippies might be eyeroll-inducing, but they’re Mostly Harmless. The Right is killing us.
ETA: I’m being literal with “sungazing hippies”. There are people who think you can receive all the nourishment you need from staring at the sun. I’m not making this up.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@jethro: Yeah, thought this when I read the post and watched the video, and I figured your early-in-the-thread admonition would sort of shame people. But it didn’t. Guess they just think you’re a concern troll. Guess it makes me one, too.