Joe Barton (R-TX): Dumber Than Dirt-Much, MUCH Dumber.

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Apr 25, 2009 at 09:00


TPM first called my attention to the incredible stupidity that is Joe Barton (R-TX).

This is stupidity so deep it's invincible-stupidity far too stupid to ever be capable of realizing it might not have all 52 cards.  After all, how can you realize that, when the whole damn deck is missing?

Here's the deal: Barton asks Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary Steve Chu a dumb-ass question: "Where does Alaska's oil come from?" Then he proudly posts the exchange on YouTube, bragging on Twitter:

But, of course, Chu wasn't the least bit baffled-except, perhaps, as to why this clown was asking him such an irrelevant question.  Barton was just way too full of himself with delight at his "coup" that he didn't even bother listening to what Chu said--and even if he had, there's no way on God's green Earth he could have understood it.  He's just far too dumb:

Making an ass of himself and then pointing at the other guy is, apparently, about as bright as Burton gets.  A few folks around the blogosphere have had some fun things to say about him, but I wanted to underscore that upside-downism may well be his own particular style of dumb.  You see, back in early 2006, when the oiligopoly had driven prices through the roof, and Hugo Chavez used Venezuela's ownership of CITGO to lower prices to low-income communities in the US, Barton decided to go after CITGO (and only CITGO), using the cover story of investigating potential anti-trust violations. Waaay too stupid to know how stupid he is.

Paul Rosenberg :: Joe Barton (R-TX): Dumber Than Dirt-Much, MUCH Dumber.
First, A Couple of Snide Observations:

Questionable Authority:

Rep. Joe Barton: Not Smarter Than A 6th Grader....

I'm have no way of knowing for sure what the poor Energy Secretary took from the exchange, but I can make a few guesses. I suspect that the laughter was coming from hearing yet another person disprove the old classroom saying that there's no such thing as a stupid question. He moved from there to attempting to provide the sort of explanation that he'd give an adult, then after the first interruption he clearly shifted mental gears, and downgraded to the 6th grade level explanation.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.

So let me try.

Yes, Representative Barton, you are correct in thinking that the presence of oil and gas indicates that Alaska was warmer when the fossils were deposited. What Secretary Chu was trying to point out to you is that this is not because the North Pole had tropical temperatures back then. It's because Alaska was a lot closer to the equator back then.

By the way, that's pretty close to the explanation my 6th grader gave me when I asked her that question at dinner.

Huffington Post:

Here are some other questions Barton should have asked:
    "Why can't I see the wind? Is it made of ghosts?"

    "Why does the ocean have so much water in it?"

    "How come sometimes when I look at a cloud, it reminds me of a shape, like a horse or an airplane or something?"

    "Why are things all different colors?"

Then A Follow-up:

Wonkette advances the story:

Texas Rep. Joe Barton has been harnessing all of the momentum he built up the other day when he kicked the everlasting fuck out of that Chinese science fag, "Choo Choo," with his mind powers. According to the Sierra Club hippies, Barton followed up yesterday with this uber-pwnage: "Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) says Americans will only drive hybrids under military force: Barton not only said that hybrids don't pay for themselves over time, which isn't true, but he said that Americans will only drive them when forced to do so by the government, 'backed by the army.'" It's hilarious how close Joe Barton pushes the limit but always stops just before shouting "I LITERALLY DO WHATEVER THE OIL COMPANIES TELL ME TO DO." And yes, the military will make us drive gay robot cars, for Gaia.

And A Flash-back:

Think Progress is the place to go for a flashback:

BARTON: I believe that Earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons. And I think man-kind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth. When it rains we find shelter. When it's hot, we get shade. When it's cold, we find a warm place to stay. Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.

And A Change of Pace:

But to really branch out, and savor the long-form idiocy and total oil-corporation abject peonage of which Barton is capable, we need to switch gears and let Democracy Now take us back to the dark ages of early 2006, when Barton was still part of the House majority.  When Katrina was still fresh in the national imagination.  When the existence of poverty had been freshly re-presented to the American people, and when the oiligopoly had driven prices through the roof.  That's when Hugo Chavez was using Venezuela's ownership of CITGO to lower prices to low-income communities in the US--a move first announced on Democracy Now the previous September, which is included, in retrospect, as part of this clip, which features an interview with Bronx Representative Jose Serrano.  In response to the Chavez initiative, Barton decided to go after CITGO (and only CITGO), using the cover story of investigating potential anti-trust violations:

Amy Goodman [Into]: In Washington, Republican Congressman Joe Barton of Texas has launched an investigation into one of the world's major oil companies. But he is not investigating whether any of the oil giants are engaging in price gouging at a time when gasoline and heating oil casts are skyrocketing. Instead Barton has set his sights on the only oil company that actually dared to lower its prices last year-at least for the poorest Americans. Last week Barton demanded the Venezuelan-owned company Citgo produce all records, minutes, logs, e-mails and even desk calendars related to the company's novel program of supplying discounted heating oil to low-income communities in the United States. The Citgo program, which began late last year in Massachusetts and the South Bronx, provides oil at discounts as high as 60% off market price. We hear an excerpt of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He first announced the discounted gas program during an interview with Democracy Now! on September 16, 2005....

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I called Congressman Joe Barton's office earlier this week to ask what prompted this, and the response of the Chief of Staff of the House Energy Committee was that Hugo Chavez was interfering in U.S.-in the United States government oil policy, and that therefore they wanted to investigate whether there was actually some antitrust violations occurring. Your response?

Yup, that's right!  ONE oil company, acting in defiance of all the other oil companies, who are all colluding to raise raise prices together.  Thats' the classic definition of an anti-trust violation!  Am I right?  Party of Teddy Roosevelt?  (Well, at least until that Bullmoose nastiness.)

You can read the transcript, or watch the whole thing:

Bottom line?  Here is the genius of Joe Barton: "I know you are, but what am I?"

In fact, one might well say that's the genius of the entire GOP right about now.

Tags: , , , (All Tags)
Print Friendly View Send As Email
Joe Barton (R-TX): Dumber Than Dirt-Much, MUCH Dumber. | 24 comments
Please be more careful (4.00 / 2)
I live in Texas, as I must say that many of the people I know here represent these Bartonian remarks. That is why we are proud to be part of a dee-mocer-ass-ee. If you do not tone down your aloof and arrogant remarks, WE WILL SECEDE! And then you'll be sorry!
Just plays dumb on TV (4.00 / 3)
I really don't think that Joe Barton is dumb.  He has a bachelor's in engineering from Texas A&M and a master's from Purdue.  He gave the sort of question that was carefully correlated to play for "the rubes" for the benefit of the oil compoanies he used to formally work for.

Tezas has a long and distinguished history of trapping unprepared "genises" through questioning by rubes and "dirt farmers."  Back in the late 40s and 50s, one legendary liberal state legislator routinely tripped up the finest tax lawyers the oil companies could import.  Barton thinks he is part of that lineage (yeah, right).

Chu's answer was also toned down in an attempt to talk to the congressman and not to a scientist.  He actually would have done better to set it up with a little frame for the laymen.  Yes, tropical or semi tropical fossils have been found near both the North and South poles.  What that really means is that over millions of years the position of the continents has shifted as the tectonic plates have slowly moved.  The same geological processes that formed oil in Texas or Saudi Arabia were at work in what is noew Alaska.  That process takes place primarily in warm weather spots.  Over a long period of time a warm or warm-ish spot shifted towards a colder place.  

Plenty Of Folks With Technical Degrees Are Still Dumb As Dirt (4.00 / 2)
It's sad, but true.  I once had a professional chemist try to convince me that cold fusion was not fantasy, but a well-established process known as chemisorption.  This was being dumb in his own field.  But it's far more common outside one's field.  For example, there seem to be a wildly disproportionate amount of electronic engineers drawn to evolution denial.  Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has written extensively about how specialized knowledge fails to generalize unless there is a process of unlearning earlier erroneous pre-conceptions.

So, yes, it's possible that Barton is just having us all on.  But this seems highly unlikely in the case with CITGO.  Surely a more plausible cover story could have been concocted.  What could possibly have been gained by using the stupidest one imaginable?

I'd hardly fault Chu's response.  This question was asked as time was running out, and he gave a perfectly adequate response.  Not a make-up-for-total-lack-of-any-understanding kind of answer.  But that's not the sort of answer one is primed for giving in that sort of setting.  There's no reason at all for Chu to be thinking in those terms.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Science and the quest for the grail (0.00 / 0)
If someone in a garage could come up with a way to jiu-jitsu the strong force, turn gravity on itself, or travel through wormholes, we'd all be happy about it, wouldn't we? To me, the willingness to believe that someone has done such things isn't so different from the willingness to believe that new technologies can solve problems which old technologies created. Odd that he former is called ignorance (at this point, anyway) and the latter forms the basis of conventional wisdom in our time. Curioser and curiouser, if you ask me.

The lovely thing about science -- apart from the glories of the process itself -- is that its findings are cumulative, and the burden of proof, when we want to assemble the pieces in a fundamentally different way, is on the scientific community as a whole. There really are no shortcuts, just as there aren't any in life itself.

[ Parent ]
This is why Mathematicians make terrible scientists (0.00 / 0)
And I say this as a Mathematician.

Briefly, it's the difference between inductive reasoning (Math) and deductive reasoning (Science).

[ Parent ]
It All Depends (0.00 / 0)
Applied mathematics is a whole different can of worms.

Plus, I had a math professor who was quite the amature botanist, and easily could have been a professional if he'd so chosen.

But your central thrust is certainly true.  The strong tendency runs toward elegant solutions that are constantly disappointed by how clumsily reality has solved things.

I'm sure you must know the one about how they determine whether a grad student goes into math or physics, right?  The one with the Bunsen burners and the coffee?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
That's easy! (0.00 / 0)
As a mathematician, I can tell you that the answer can be derived from a previous solution. :-)
[ Parent ]
Mud wrestling (4.00 / 2)
Glenn Greenwald claims that motives are inscrutable. Since he can't discern them with any confidence -- the human psyche being complicated and all -- he prefers to take people at their word, and criticize or praise what they say and do on that basis alone. So he says, anyway.

Although I do admire Glenn's simplicity, and tenacity, I often find it awfully one-dimensional. A lawyerly approach may be useful in limiting an argument to facts demonstrably in evidence, but because the context in which nasty political events are embedded is usually at least as complicated, and as hidden, as individual human motivations, sticking to the facts rarely suffices when confronting politicians, whose stock in trade, like that of all grifters, is the art of seeming.

Attempting to figure out what's really going on, motivations and all, may lead on occasion to flirtations with the purely fanciful -- see the 9/11 truthers, for a recent example -- or result in a kind of latter-day scholasticism which influences no one, but without it, I think we're easy prey for both fools and demagogues.

Secretary Chu has genuinely important things to get done; he can afford to let a blowhard oil company shill do a little grandstanding, but the rest of us should go after Rep. Burton pretty much the way Paul does here. It's doubtful we'll ever get the chance to confront him directly, but we run into his like pretty much every day, even in places like California or New York. It's time they got a little stick, doncha think? Call 'em dumb; if they then want to pull out their degrees in petroleum engineering, so much the better. Then we can call them liars.

[ Parent ]
Precisely! (0.00 / 0)
You've correctly divined my hidden intent!

Call 'em dumb; if they then want to pull out their degrees in petroleum engineering, so much the better. Then we can call them liars.


"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
I don't normally agree with underestimating the intelligence of our opponents (4.00 / 1)
as a strategy.  I can't agree with people who for most of the Bush administration used to console themselves with mocking the rubes, all the while they were kicking our collective ass.

However, I find myself unable to resist pointing to another, even more egregious example of the genre:

Michelle Bachmann speaking on Carbon Dioxide.

"A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent."  What idiots these global warming deniers be.  If CO2 doesn't cause cancer it can't be bad.


sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

Wait Till Tomorrow (0.00 / 0)
I was going to run Barton and Bachmann back-to-back, but I decided to run her in the same slot tomorrow morning instead.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Well (4.00 / 1)
There is playing dumb and then there is really dumb.  Michele Bachmann seems like a good candidate for really dumb.
[ Parent ]
Meanwhile the Guardian filed this devastating report (4.00 / 1)
yesterday on global warming's impact on the Uru Chipaya tribe:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

Highly recommended viewing. "God's green earth" is looking rather less so.
(H/t this diary at Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/... )

OK, this is where liberals show their own bias. (0.00 / 0)
Look, isn't it perfectly clear from Chu's response that he, in fact, got the answer way wrong, and, that, in fact, Barton caught him in a howling error?

Basically, and clearly, Chu was saying that the reason Alaska had so much oil was that the area of the earth's surface which is represents was once much further south, where the vegetation necessary for the creation of oil could flourish, and that that swath of surface had drifted up over geological time into the Artic. He did not acknowledge (or perhaps even know) the truth, that once upon a time the earth was, in its entirety, much much warmer, the very most north included, and that that was when the sources of Alaska's oil thrived.

Even ThinkProgress acknowledges this fact:

Ironically for someone who has called climate science "absolute nonsense," Barton was actually onto something. During the Triassic, the entire planet was indeed a hothouse and entirely deglaciated.

Personally, I'm genuinely surprised, and a bit appalled that Chu got this so wrong. My strongest impression is that the vast amount of movement taking place in continental drift has been east-west, not north-south, so, unless there was some quite anomalous local behavior with respect to Alaska in particular, one simply wouldn't expect much drift north-south.

In the end, Chu got it wrong, Barton got it right. And Barton's an idiot?

Sorry, No (4.00 / 2)
As a youthful dinosaur obsessive, of course I know that the world was once much, much warmer than it is today.  But that's not why there's a lot of oil in the Arctic. (And no, dinosaurs are not where most of our oil comes from.  It comes from small sea creatures.)

Plate tectonics is a key factor, as it's the movement of plates that plays a key role in forming regions where large quantities of oil are concentrated over tens of millions of years.  Oil deposits get concentrated in more porous rock formations, trapped under cap rocks, and plate tectonics in turn transport cap rock formations and/or shape them in advance.

Scientific processes are complex--because reality is complex.   Given this fact, it's very easy to pick some intermetiate level of complexity and misrepresent it as the explanation.  This is, in essence, what you are doing here.  Chu was doing the better thing--focusing on the right level and explaining it in simple, easily visualized terms.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
By that logic, there would be oil (0.00 / 0)
in every warm region. It's entirely insufficient as an argument.

 

[ Parent ]
barton is a right winger (0.00 / 0)
and they are void of intellect and ideas to advance the lives of the average citizen. i realize that many average joe and janes support these missing links because of their personal prejudices that the rw use to keep the masses voting against their own self interests and the interests of america in general, maybe someday the supporters of the rw will realize they are being used to advance an agenda that is counter productive to most americans values and life styles.  
Stupid Question? (0.00 / 0)
While I have no doubt from the exchange that Barton is missing a few cards, the question itself was not stupid.  As opposed to all the questions listed from Huffington post, no one knew the correct answer only 50 or so years ago.

If fact, when Barton went to college, the answer to this question may still have been a mystery.

BTW, franky0, plate tectonics is the reason for both tropical decay to work its way up to the north pole in the form of oil and the reason the north pole was warmer during the time of Pangaea.  Back then the there was only one big ocean and the north pole was a part of it.  This allowed for a great deal of energy transfer, unifying the temperature across the non-land portion of the planet.

Well, okay.... (0.00 / 0)
Can we at least agree on disingenuous? (As long as we're being polite.) ;-)
[ Parent ]
Hell yeah (4.00 / 1)
In fact, I think the correct response, politically, is to call him dumber than dirt.  I suck at this game, obviously.

But yes, he was being completely disingenuous.  I'd call him a liar if he actually stated anything directly.  I'm certain he knew the answer long before he asked the question (or at least, should have) and then did probably lie in the twitter.

He's trying to make the point the Earth was once naturally warmer.  Of course, the period of time in question was before several large scale extinctions, some of which were triggered by global climate change.  So the point isn't worth that much to begin with.

[ Parent ]
A Bucket Of Warm Piss (4.00 / 1)
So the point isn't worth that much to begin with.

That's what it's not worth.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Boy, Are You Easy! (0.00 / 0)
Your daughter must have you in the palm of her hand.

If fact, when Barton went to college, the answer to this question may still have been a mystery.

When Barton went to college, he may well have never gone to class.  All the answers may have been mysteries.  

They may be still.



"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
"How come sometimes when I look at a cloud... (0.00 / 0)
...it reminds me of a shape, like a horse or an airplane or something?" - from "Deep Thoughts" by Jeff Handey
Barton (like Palin) probably beleives in this: (0.00 / 0)
Young Earth creationism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Young Earth creationism (YEC) is the religious belief that the Heavens, Earth, and life on Earth were created by direct acts of God during a short period, sometime between 6,000[1] and 10,000 years ago. Its adherents are those Christians and Jews[2] who believe that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days, taking the Hebrew text of Genesis as a literal account.[1][3] Some adherents believe that existing evidence in the natural world today supports a strict interpretation of scriptural creation as historical fact. Those adherents believe that the scientific evidence supporting evolution, geological uniformitarianism, or other theories which are at odds with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account, are either flawed or misinterpreted...

SOURCE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...

Joe Barton (R-TX): Dumber Than Dirt-Much, MUCH Dumber. | 24 comments





Donate to Open Left




blog advertising is good for you
blog advertising is good for you
LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS
STATE BLOGS
USER MENU

QUICK HITS
SEARCH

   

Advanced Search

Home | RSS/XML Feed | Register | Contact

  © OpenLeft 2007-2010, Powered by SoapBlox