Everyone's favorite GOP muppet, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, really managed to outdo himself this week. And considering how things have gone for him so far, that's really saying something.
Your correspondent is not sure whether it's good or bad for Mr. Steele that he hosted an entire 2-hour radio show on March 6 and nobody noticed until this week, but that's what happened. Most of the news centered around his declaration of "ultimate political armageddon" (doesn't that sound like a Japanese game show?) and his bizarre accusation that Obama somehow equals Nixon. But he also made some rather choice comments about global warming. To wit:
"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? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long."
Now, we aren't surprised that Michael Steele doesn't believe in global warming. Such a view is practically required to hold any sort of leadership position within the party's Beltway establishment. He is the person who foisted "drill, baby, drill" on us on the first place, after all. What is at least midly surprising, however, is that Michael Steele has apparently been duped by a centuries old myth propagated by a bunch of dead Vikings.
Greenland was most certainly not green when it was discovered by a seriously off course Viking, Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, in the early 10th Century. The island was given its name by famed Viking marauder Erik the Red. The Saga of Erik the Red and a 12th Century history of Iceland, the Íslendingabók, both describe how the name was really a clever ruse to lure settlers to the island's less-than-tropical shores: "He named the land Greenland, saying that people would be eager to go there if it had a good name."
This should all seem very familiar to Michael Steele. He is of course trying a similar trick with his "hip hop makeover" of the GOP in order to lure "urban-suburban" minorities to the party in a bid to head off its ultimate Whig-ification.
A quick look at the bustling urban landscape of Greenland would seem to indicate that Michael Steele may actually in fact be the first person in history to fall for Erik the Red's scheme. I think it would be safe to assume that Steele's own plans will have an equally high success rate.
(No word yet on whether Steele's economic recovery plan is predicated on finding the lost city of El Dorado.)