You, sir, are a moron.

Representative Young, you are a moron.

“This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a natural phenomena. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe. … We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover.”

A Rush Limbaugh-style moron, which is not a distinction many people are able to sink low enough to achieve. So hats off to you, I suppose, in an uncomfortable, “my what a spectacular train wreck that is” sort of why.

Of course, I’m not quite sure if it’s actual stupidity that’s making these men say such asinine things (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re being parroted by others now) or just flat out intellectual dishonesty.

So when Limbaugh says something like:

Oil is as much a part of nature as water is. … If we didn’t do anything, it would recover.

I’m forced to spend a lot of time wondering if he was actually just born that way, of it he really had to put a lot of time and effort in to becoming that absolutely dishonest.

Oil seeps are, indeed, natural. There are even natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico. But you know, arsenic naturally occurs in food, too, but you wouldn’t want a large arsenic spill to occur on your hamburger. The natural oil seeps (per that source) come to an average of 140,000 tons per year, which is around a million barrels of oil. In a year. Spread out through the entire Gulf of Mexico.

If you go with this handy yet incredibly depressing ticker from PBS, we’re up to around 21 million barrels already as our best case scenario, in a bit over 40 days. The poison is in the dose, you know. And let’s be clear – we would not be getting this sort of oil flow if it weren’t for human activities, and as has become increasingly clear, gross human negligence.

What makes me the angriest is really the high-handed assumption that anything we do is no big deal, because mommy Earth will clean it up for us eventually. The absolute disregard for suffering is just breathtaking. The environment might eventually regain its equilibrium after a major spill, though I think you could just as easily argue that it will likely reach a new, different equilibrium instead. But here’s the thing. The Earth, the environment, are inanimate entities. They do not give two shits about living things, our incredibly short (on a geological time scale) lives, or any pain or suffering we might feel. It’s up to us to care. And considering that collectively we are the cause of that suffering, we damn well should care.

It must be quite easy to not care, to dismiss that suffering and try to squirm around the scary word “disaster” if you make millions of dollars a year being a professional douchebag on the radio, or live quite well as a politician far, far away from the place where the lives of animals both human and non-human are being destroyed.

I’ve changed my mind about the moron thing. It’s far worse than that.

You, sir, are a monster.