Did you know that President Joe Biden is human? And like most humans, he has a body, and is not a robot. While this may sound rudimentary, it’s apparently a reminder climate deniers need, as after they all made the same exact joke about Biden’s not-even-30-second-slumber party, they focused their attention on a Daily Mail story claiming the President farted.
To be fair, it’s objectively (allegedly) hilarious that the President let rip such a mighty blast that the Duchess of Cornwall Camilla Parker Bowles “hasn’t stopped talking about” it, according to an anonymous source, and neither have rightwing tabloids.
But that’s where the sincere laughs stop, and the cringe-fest began, as conservative climate opponents struggled to find more than their one joke and live up to the meme that the right is getting better at comedy and it’s starting to make the left nervous.
Not only did they post various versions of “delegates traveled” memes, but multiple political cartoonists also recycled the premise (and presumed punchline). But those weren’t quite as cursed as Trump-lionizing and thinly-veiled antisemitic cartoonist who definitely understood Don Quijote, Ben Garrison, whose old drawing of a cleavage-y vaguely Ivanka-ish Mother Nature giving a spanking to a crying Greta over her knee was a hit for the very normal audience at the Facebook group “climate change is crap.”
Similarly sexist vibes have been bouncing around the conservative pseudo-media class, as they apply the “woman laughing is bad” template they rolled out for Vice President Harris earlier this year to apply to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. During a recent Bloomberg Business interview, Granholm laughed at the suggestion that she could control the global oil market, and the right predictably took the context-less clip the Bloomberg reporter inexplicably shared to suggest she’s laughing at working class people struggling to pay their gas bills. The Daily Caller covered it as outrage-bait, as did the Federalist and TownHall, and the Daily Mail covered the wider GOP response while the Daily Wire covered Republican Senator John Barrasso’s specific comments on it.
This wasn’t Barrasso’s only friendly echo-chamber from his Sunday show run, as the Daily Caller also made a story out of Barrasso’s comments on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.” While there’s always some allegations that the US is going to lose its sovereignty to the UN (as though the US doesn’t basically control the UN!) and even though the central tenet of the Paris Agreement is that no country is responsible to any other for anything except their own domestic goals, the right still loves to fearmonger about the UN.
Case in point, Barrasso said: “Joe Biden and a large entourage of Democrats from the House and the Senate and his cabinet all jetting off to Europe to a climate conference and for what purpose? What did he do there? He pledged allegiance to the flag of the United Nations instead of to the flag of the United States… He basically apologized for America. He begged OPEC and [Valadmir] [sic] Putin to create more energy, to make more energy. And he promised to raise energy prices in America.”
Presumably Barrasso was being metaphorical and not claiming that Biden recited a pledge that doesn’t exist to a flag no one cares about, but the Daily Caller headline quoting him sure made it sound literal. So we ventured into the comment section to see how the Caller’s audience interpreted the “news” and… yikes.
“That’s what globalists do,” said 2smartforlibs. Kit Jefferson was even less subtle, saying “Joe Biden pledged his soul to the dark side a long time ago” but even that was too refined for Donna Jorgenson Farrell, who posted that Biden “pledged allegiance to the flag of Satan,” which we did not even know was a thing, but which is available in the Home and Garden section of AliExpress.
And despite the Caller’s use of OpenWeb commenting system because users were “begging [them] for better content moderation,” one commenter said there are “plenty of reasons for an American Patriot to ‘end’” Biden, Harris and Pelosi (though he did not use those names, to put it mildly).
Anyway, tune in tomorrow to find out if the GOP’s presence at COP is actually in good faith, or if their new pro-climate pose is just the latest expression of denial! (Hint: their plan won’t even meet their own proclaimed target, itself weaker than even fossil fuel company’s greenwashing goals.)
