Remember when RNC chairman Michael Steele criticized Rush Limbaugh, then was forced to back down and issue a groveling apology to the true head of the Republican Party?

Well, Steele has completed his reeducation programming, and is now spouting craziness just like any Limbaugh supporter, accusing the Obama administration of being like the Nixon administration — and demonizing Rush Limbaugh.

(These remarks are from his appearance on the William Bennett radio show.)

“I’m going to tell you something,” Steele replied. “You make such an important point, because I had a conversation earlier this week about the very point you just made about the Nixon administration. What you are seeing here, folks, unfold is nothing short of the Nixon administration played out in a different era and a different style. But the results and the effects are the same. You have H.R. Haldeman and Rahm Emanuel, these guys, the master manipulators, the master controllers in the background, moving and shaking the pieces, creating an enemies list, putting together the targets on our side. The whole strategy of demonizing Rush Limbaugh, which has been exposed now…”

And that’s not all. Steele also is now cleaving to the right wing denialist line on global warming — and to make it even more ridiculous, he claims the globe is “cooling.”

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “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? Not very long.”

Steele isn’t just willfully ignorant about global warming — he’s shockingly uneducated about the origin of the name “Greenland.”

There are two written sources on the origin of the name, in The Book of Icelanders (Íslendingabók), a historical work dealing with early Icelandic history from the 12th century, and in the medieval Icelandic saga, The Saga of Eric the Red (Eiríks saga rauða), which is about the Norse settlement in Greenland and the story of Erik the Red in particular. Both sources write: “He named the land Greenland, saying that people would be eager to go there if it had a good name.”

Bad craziness at the very top of the GOP.