How dumb is Ted Cruz? Oh wow he's really super mega dumb. Not only does he look like a pile of rocks that's been assembled into a roughly human shape, that's about how smart he is, too.
And it's not just me saying that. It's been confirmed by science!
"This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner," says Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University meteorology professor.
The Associated Press ran a bunch of anonymized quotes from presidential candidates about climate change past some science-doers, and asked them to score them from zero to one hundred on accuracy. Ted Cruz came dead last, at 6% accurate.
It's no surprise that a Republican's lying about climate change, but now we have independent confirmation that Cruz's lies are the worst. For example:
Climate change, as they have defined it, can never be disproved, because whether it gets hotter or whether it gets colder, whatever happens, they’ll say, well, it’s changing, so it proves our theory.
Oh Jesus what the living fuck are you even talking about, Ted Cruz. Climate change can never be proven because the climate is always changing? WHAT.
Then there's this: "The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn't happened."
Cruz parrots this little factoid over and over, but it's really not true. When pressed, he'll say that satellite data over a narrow span of years doesn't show any warming. That might be true, but thermometers here on Earth certainly do.
He also thinks that scientists have been waffling back and forth between global warming and global cooling, but that's not true, either — even back to the 1960s, there was far more consensus that warming would be a problem.
He even compared himself to Galileo, sure, why not. "You know, it is, today the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers. You know, it used to be, it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier."
Ughhhhhhh no Ted Cruz, everyone knew the planet was round. Magellan circumnavigated the globe almost a century before Galileo got in trouble with the church.
Also, the whole Galileo thing involved a conflict between someone noting scientifically observable facts and someone else refusing to recognize objective evidence, so in that scenario which party do you really think you are?
And it's not just climate change, of course. He called for a federal repeal of Common Core curriculum, which is a fine thing to demand except that Common Core isn't a federal program. He spoke out against Ebola prevention tactics because they were too complicated for him to understand. He wished for 100 more senators like Jesse Helms, you know, the guy who tried to block the Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
If there's any good news about Cruz running for president, it's that it's keeping him too busy to do his real job: leading the Congressional subcommittee that oversees NASA.
