Pat Robertson, the nutty uncle of the evangelist right, neatly sums up the problem with America in this clip from Right Wing Watch: Americans have too much book learnin’, and it keeps them from seeing miracles all the time like they do in Africa, where they’re “simple and humble.”

I think he hits the wingnut trifecta in this one: anti-intellectual, anti-science and patronizingly racist.

“Well, we are so sophisticated, we think we’ve got everything figured out, we know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real, we know about all this stuff,” Robertson lamented, “in many schools, in the most advanced schools, we have been inundated with skepticism and secularism.”

Unlike these too-educated Americans, “overseas they are simple and humble” and are more ready to accept miracles.

President Obama’s picks to head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are already provoking howls of outrage from the right wing and the energy industry shills who feed them talking points; they’re especially worked up about Gina McCarthy.

Gina McCarthy

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday named two people to his cabinet who will be charged with making good on his threat to use the powers of the executive branch to tackle climate change and energy policy if Congress does not act quickly.

Mr. Obama nominated Gina McCarthy, a tough-talking native of Boston and an experienced clean air regulator, to take charge at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ernest J. Moniz, a physicist and strong advocate of natural gas and nuclear power as cleaner alternatives to coal, to run the Department of Energy.

The appointments, which require Senate confirmation, send an unmistakable signal that the president intends to mount a multifaceted campaign in his second term to tackle climate change by using all the executive branch tools at his disposal.

The energy industry mouthpieces at the Heartland Institute immediately pushed this paid announcement out on PR Newswire:

“Gina McCarthy has a long history of demonizing affordable energy and doing everything possible to shut it down. She also has a long history of making up fictitious facts to support her anti-energy ideology. McCarthy’s number-one priority at EPA will be enacting unprecedented restrictions on energy production and use that will further drive up energy prices. If Americans like dramatically rising gasoline prices and rapidly rising electricity prices, they are going to love Gina McCarthy.”

James M. Taylor
Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute

[…]

“During litigation on the EPA’s claim that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health, the attorney for the EPA, introduced as the technical expert, falsely asserted to the Court that the climate models used are valid. The models have never been validated and are failing miserably. The Earth stopped warming over a decade ago, contradicting the models. The models are also contradicted by the characteristics of late twentieth-century warming.

“Under Ms. McCarthy we can expect further deterioration of American science as the EPA ignores scientific facts that do not support its political agenda.”

Kenneth Haapala
Executive Vice President
Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

That’s what the pseudo-science wing says; now let’s go to Pat Robertson for the religious right view. Proving himself a master of the art of wingnut projectionism, old Pat went on a rant about Gina McCarthy today, denouncing environmentalists as “crazies” and “religious fanatics,” who are “unreasonable” and “doctrinaire.”

Sounds to me like Ms. McCarthy is a perfect choice for the position.

That sound you hear is my jaw hitting the floor, as religious right crocodile Pat Robertson actually says that dinosaurs existed before the Bible — and that the Earth is older than 6,000 years. It’s surprising (to say the least!) to hear one of America’s leading voices of fundamentalist Christianity breaking ranks with the determinedly ignorant literalists.

Right Wing Watch points out, however, that Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network continues to sell books promoting young Earth creationism to the rubes.

Back in January we had a post about Pat Robertson’s announcement that God had revealed to him who the next President of the US would be, broadly hinting around that The Man Upstairs was definitely not fond of Barack Obama. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network went on to confidently predict a Romney landslide in the 2012 election.

Oops.

Today Robertson excused his absurdly wrong predictions by saying he missed God’s message, even though it sure seemed at the time like he was hearing the voice of the Almighty.

He doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility that God was just messing with him. Because He could.

Pat Robertson has been saying some surprising things; recently he came out in favor of legalizing marijuana, and today Right Wing Watch notes this section of his TV show 700 Club in which we learn, to our astonishment, that although he believes scientists should not “speculate about the origins of life,” Robertson is not a young earth creationist. Or a flat-earther.

Robertson: God created the world; the laws of nature were created by God. True science tries to find out what God put in the world. The trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don’t know what they’re talking about because they weren’t there. They can’t speculate about the origins of life because they weren’t there. If they tell you observable phenomenon then we ought to believe them, and I tell you if you find a geologist who tells you something existed 300 million years ago then you better believe them because he knows what he’s talking about. We don’t want our religious theory go with flat earth.

On the other hand, Pat isn’t exactly a big fan of Charles Darwin or the theory of evolution either: Robertson claimed “evolutionists worship atheism,” evolutionary theory a “cultish religion”.

According to Pat Robertson, homosexuality is “related to demonic possession.” Yes, this really is how the religious right thinks.

Religious right crocodile Pat Robertson said on his TV show “The 700 Club” that God told him who the next president will be.

But he’s “not supposed to talk about it.”

God did give Pat permission, though, to let the world know that He’s not a fan of Barack Obama.

Sometimes I marvel at what an odd country America is, that there are actually people here who watch this repellent old fraud and truly believe he has a direct line to the Almighty — just because he says so.

Together at last — raving anti-Muslim bigots Pat Robertson and Robert Spencer, on Robertson’s TV show “The 700 Club,” explaining to their delusional audience that the media and the left wing are a bunch of no-good Muslim-lovers.

The Geller-Spencer crowd hasn’t even slowed down in the wake of the Oslo atrocities. On the contrary, they’ve ratcheted up the rhetoric and are using the terror attacks to further inflame their followers.

Creepy preacher Pat Robertson’s feelings are hurt. People keep calling him a bigot just because he hates Muslims and equates them all to Nazis. Feel his pain.

“I wonder what were people who opposed the Nazis, were they bigots?”

“Why is it bigoted to resist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and to say we don’t want to live under Nazi Germany?” Robertson said. “But oh it’s bigoted if we speak out against a force that slowly but surely is trying to exercise domination over the world.”

Pat Robertson has figured out why the left is so “livid” about killing babies: because they want to make straight women more like lesbians.

I’m not making this up.

Meeuwsen: There are lots of government-funded agencies in this country. Why do you think the President picked that one above all else to say, ‘not one penny’?

Robertson: Well it’s the left; it’s this culture of death. The far-left is livid about killing babies. They want to kill do this, they want to destroy. You go back, and I don’t want to play all this psychological stuff but nevertheless, if a woman is a lesbian, what advantage does she have over a married woman? Or what deficiency does she have?

Meeuwsen: Well she can’t have children.

Robertson: That’s exactly right. And so if these married women don’t have children, if they abort their babies, then that kind of puts them on a level playing field. And you say, nobody’s there to express that? Isn’t that shocking, well think about it a little bit ladies and gentlemen.