From top to bottom this week, the right-wing was all atwitter (literally) when it came to energy and climate issues. All of the activity did nothing so much as to underscore just how truly out of touch many conservatives are on these critically important issues.
The Tea Party set turned it up to 11 and cold went bonkers when the House passed the American Clean Energy & Security Act. Stories of angry emails, phone calls, protests and angry encounters at town hall meetings steadily percolated back to Washington. Some stories seemed almost too outrageous to be believed.
Well, any remaining disbelief quickly evaporated when video from a town hall meeting held by Rep. Mike Castle (a moderate Delaware Republican endorsed by the Sierra Club) hit the tubes early this week. The most-widely disseminated clip featured a so-called "birther" shouting down Rep. Castle. But a longer version also showed numerous attendees spouting traditional right-wing nonsense questioning the science of global warming or the economic impacts of clean energy legislation. If you don't understand what the media means by "lunatic fringe," just take a looksee at this video:
And this, my friends, took place in a state that went nearly 62 percent for Obama. I can only imagine what goes on elsewhere. It just goes to show what happens when people are "fed a constant stream of misinformation and incitement from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Prison Planet, Americans for Prosperity, and the rest of the right-wing machine," as our friends at ThinkProgress put it.
Unfortunately, rambling about bad ideas and failed policies is not an affliction limited to a few conspiracy theorists at a town hall meeting in Delaware. Indeed, one of the de facto leaders of the GOP, Sarah Palin, really managed to outdo herself on this front this week.
We reported last week on her spectacularly misguided debut as the right wing's foremost national advocate for the failed Bush-Big Oil-Dick Cheney energy policies of yesteryear. (Senators Kerry and Boxer published a nice retort of their own today in the Washington Post.)
In between dodging the latest allegations of ethical improprieties (this one being that setting up a legal defense to defend herself against ethics complaints may have itself, somewhat ironically, violated ethics laws), she took to Twitter, as is her wont.
If, following her half-baked opinion piece in the Post, we had any doubts about where her allegiances lay, they were dispelled by her tweets. In several 140-character brain farts, Palin espoused the same old dreck about drilling in the Arctic Refuge and offshore that we've come to expect from conservatives beholden to Big Oil. But she did manage to spice up even this rather tired line of argument by presenting it in her characteristically disjointed style. One news outlet even went so far as to compare them to the tweets emanating from Courtney Love, who is somewhat notorious for her, shall we say, stream of consciousness/auto-writing/monkeys at a typewriter-style of twittering.
(And lest this still be too boring for you, Palin also promised that one of the "side benefits" of her decision to step down this weekend is that "less politically correct twitters [will] fly frm my fingertps outside State site.")
Luckily for Palin, "drill, baby, drill" only takes up 18 characters, leaving a full 122 more to pay homage to Big Oil, dirty coal, and the nukes that she loves so much.
Now that's what I call politically incorrect.