Do you want me to send you back to where you were? Unemployed? In Greenland‽

 Michael Steele appears to be angling to be the Sarah Palin of 2009:

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? 

greenland.pngWell, if you believe the folklore, Erik the Red named it Greenland to trick Icelanders into emigrating there. (Iceland, meanwhile, was supposedly named so as to hide its lush green beauty from the mainlanders.) It’s also possible that “Greenland” is a corruption of “Gruntland,” grunt meaning ground, a reference to the shallow bays surrounding the southern, habitable land.

What is certain is that Greenland has not been a lush tropical paradise since the Triassic period, and that it’s been covered with ice for at least the past 110,000 years, which means that Greenland has been covered in ice for the entire history of behaviorally modern humans.

It also means that Michael Steele doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. But that’s well-established at this point.

This entry posted in Environmental issues. Bookmark the permalink. 

7 Responses to Do you want me to send you back to where you were? Unemployed? In Greenland‽

  1. 1
    Sailorman says:

    Jeez, where’s that guy from? French Lick or something?

  2. 2
    Ampersand says:

    Great post title. :-)

    And as for Steele… the terrifying thing is, he’s not at all the most extreme or the stupidest person in the leadership of the Republican party.

  3. 3
    Jake Squid says:

    I’ve got to say that I’m really enjoying Michael Steele’s tenure. Can you remember a more entertaining person in that position? I sure can’t.

  4. 4
    Charles S says:

    I thought Ed Gillespie was pretty reliably funny on the Daily Show, but he certainly never provided as satisfying of humor (watching your enemies by witty and intentionally funny just doesn’t satisfy like watching them unintentionally make fools of themselves).

  5. 5
    RonF says:

    This reminds me of the Illinois GOP. It’s one thing to shoot yourself in the foot. It’s quite another to empty the gun into your foot, reload, and start in on the other.

  6. 6
    PG says:

    What’s particularly awful about this comment by Steele is that he apparently doesn’t get the memos that have the even halfway-plausible conservative talking points. One that I’ve heard, for example:

    England used to be much warmer than it is today — “during the medieval Little Optimum period (roughly A.D. 900 to 1300), temperatures were up to 1 degree Celsius warmer, allowing the planting of vineyards as far north as the coastal zones of the Baltic Sea and southern England. Conversely, temperature declines during the 14th century were dramatic, leading to the Little Ice Age (extending into the late 19th century), and resulted in northern vineyards dying out and growing seasons so short that harvesting grapes in southern Europe was difficult.”

    Of course, the more honest conservatives acknowledge that now the Brits are finding the silver lining in the end of that Little Ice Age by looking at the possibility that they can become a competitive wine country again.

  7. Due to the title, I heard his quote in the voice of Viccini the conniving Sicilian. Perfect silliness for what he was saying!