Party of Science Member Confused About the Moon

There’s a lot we can say about our political leaders. Are they corrupt? Yes. Are they power hungry? Yes. Are they a bunch of evil, soulless goblins? Yes. But what may be most significant — the trait that may have the most bearing on the future of our country — is that they are, by and large, extremely stupid.

There is little doubt that we are, right now, led by the dumbest collection of muddle-headed morons that has ever been assembled in our nation’s capital — or any nation’s capital. It is difficult to overstate just how monstrously stupid these people are.

If you doubt that, then please consider this video of Democrat Representative Sheila Jackson Lee.

Before we get to the video, you should understand a few things about Sheila Jackson Lee. First, she is a former member of the Science Committee. Second, she is also a former member of the Space and Aeronautics Committee. The third is that she is, once again, a sitting member of congress. In that position, she gave an address on Monday to students from Booker T. Washington High School in Houston, Texas. This address happened on the occasion of the eclipse. In fact — and this is not the really stupid part, though it is a stupid part — she claims that she, as she put it on Twitter, “created the opportunity” for the students to see the eclipse. Lee tweeted:

Today, I created the opportunity to see a unique science and solar experience for the students at Booker T. Washington High School. As a former member of the Science Committee and former Ranking Member of the Space and Aeronautics Committee, this was an irreplaceable moment in history. There should be more opportunities to introduce science to our diverse and vulnerable communities! So many students came out to see history for themselves! Many remarked “this is the first time I’ve ever seen this” as they made their way to the field. Despite over 90% of Booker T’s students being economically disadvantaged, it has managed to build an enthusiastic environment where students are excited to explore the wonders of space and exploration. The hallmark of this excitement is anchored in opportunity.

Now there’s enough in these few sentences alone to assess that Sheila Jackson Lee has approximately the IQ of a toothpick.

For one thing, she’s somehow taking credit for the eclipse. She seems to suggest that these young people would not have been able to look up at the sky and view this celestial event if not for her intervention. By gathering with the kids and pointing at the sky and saying, “Hey check it out,” she is, apparently, creating the opportunity to look at the sky. Without her, they never would have thought to look at the sky, or known how to look at it.

Second, she seems to chide us for not giving “more opportunities” to “diverse and vulnerable” communities to view events like this. But she doesn’t explain how we’re supposed to create opportunities for diverse communities to see an eclipse in the sky during times when there is no eclipse in the sky. It only happens once every several years. What are we supposed to do about that? I guess we could invite diverse communities to come outside once a month and then put our hands in front of their faces to sort of simulate the effect of an eclipse, but I’m not sure what that would achieve. Sheila Jackson Lee doesn’t elaborate.

Third, as further evidence of her toothpick IQ, she says this: “The hallmark of this excitement is anchored in opportunity.” Now I want to be very clear that this statement means absolutely nothing. There is no way to make sense of that sentence. There is no meaning we can really glean from it. I think that maybe what she’s trying to say is that the kids were excited for the opportunity to watch the eclipse, which Sheila Jackson Lee had somehow created by some unspecified means. But the phrase “anchored in opportunity” is at best clunky and unnecessarily wordy, and the phrase “the hallmark of this excitement” is just incredibly dumb. Together they make a dumb sandwich.

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In fact Sheila Jackson Lee, we can tell from this alone, is the dumbest kind of dumb person. She’s the exact inverse of the smartest kind of smart person. The smartest kind of smart person is someone who understands complex topics but talks about them in simple ways using simple words. On the other end of the spectrum is the dumbest dumb person who tries to use big words to communicate simple ideas, but doesn’t understand the words they’re using, and so they don’t manage to effectively convey even the simplest idea.

So by all of that evidence alone, we already know that Sheila Jackson Lee is a momentous moron. But it’s about to get so much worse.

At this event, before somehow, in an unclear way, providing kids the opportunity to look at the sky, she addressed the crowd of students and gave them a little lesson in astronomy.

Unfortunately, though, she has an understanding of astronomy that is so garbled, confused, and delusional that my four-year-old daughter could easily fact check her. Here’s what she said:

So, this sitting congresswoman, who has been a member of the science committee and the space committee, says that the Moon is “made up mostly of gases.” She then juxtaposes the Moon with the Sun, which she says has a “mighty powerful heat” while the Moon is “more manageable.” So she appears to believe not only that the Moon is a gaseous entity but also that it gives off its own light and heat. She very much appears to believe that the Moon is basically a much dimmer, cooler version of the Sun. I’m not exaggerating or trying to be funny here. That’s really what she apparently believes.

And it is needless to say — hopefully needless to say — completely false. The moon is solid. Its surface is rocky. The light it gives off is the light it reflects from the Sun. It does not create its own light. This is a very basic fact about our solar system that every child by first grade should understand.

If my ten-year-old thought that the Moon was made of gas, I would be concerned. That would be a disturbing level of ignorance for a ten-year-old. For a 74-year-old congresswoman it is horrifying. Not to mention baffling. I truly have no idea how you can live through seven and a half decades and never encounter even the most basic facts about the Moon. This is like if a 74-year-old woman declared that the Pacific Ocean is made of chocolate syrup. It’s not just that the belief is wildly off base. It’s that it would seem impossible to maintain such an outrageous misconception for that many years. Yet that is what she has done.

Later that day, Lee responded to the mockery over these comments. She said this: “Obviously I misspoke and meant to say the sun, but as usual, Republicans are focused on stupid things instead of stuff that really matters. What can I say though, foolish thinkers lust for stupidity!”

Now, once again, we have a statement here that makes no sense and means nothing. “Foolish thinkers lust for stupidity.” What? What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything.

She just thinks it sounds insightful, so she said it. Because she is quite literally dumber than a grasshopper. She claims that she was really talking about the Sun, which is the worst excuse she could have offered. If anyone on her team was at least slightly more intelligent than her, they would have suggested that she try to claim that she was referring to the Moon’s atmosphere when she referenced its gases.

The Moon does have a very thin atmosphere made up of helium, methane, and other gases. It would be a hell of a stretch to try to spin it that way, but at least that would be a somewhat workable excuse. Instead she comes up with the least plausible cover story imaginable.

Let’s go back and see what her statement would sound like if you swap in the word “sun” for moon. It would be this: “A full sun is a complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases. The question is how could we live on the sun? Are the gases such that we could do that? The sun is a mighty powerful heat. It’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The sun is more manageable, and you will see in a moment, well not a moment, but in a couple of years, that NASA is going back to the sun.”

To be clear, that’s what she’s claiming she meant to say. So the spin that this ignoramus came up with is that she didn’t mean to say that stupid thing —she actually meant to say an even stupider thing. Now we have a choice. Either Shiela Jackson Lee thinks that the Moon is made up of gases. Or she thinks that we can live on the Sun and that NASA, in a couple of years, will be visiting the Sun — or rather going back to it, because they’ve already visited it. Pick your poison. And keep in mind that what you just heard was only a 45 second clip of remarks that went on for more than five minutes. Remarks that also featured this claim:

Okay, now I can’t be sure what exactly this lunatic is babbling about, but she seems to be confusing an eclipse with a Supermoon. The latter occurs when a full moon coincides with the moon’s closest approach to Earth, which is something that happens not once every 20 years, but a few times every year.

As for the statement that “they will shut the light down,” I honestly have no idea what that’s even supposed to mean. Who is “they”? Does she think there are people living on the moon who manually control how much light comes from the Sun? In my entire life I’ve never heard anyone refer to the moon as a “they.” Does she think the Moon is non-binary? We can’t be sure. But she keeps going. Listen:

The Moon and Sun create our music, she says. That’s obviously asinine but it is the closest she gets to something resembling a coherent thought. The problem is that right before that she claims that there are solar systems “smaller than the Earth.” That would mean that somewhere in the universe there is a star that, together with the planets orbiting it, is smaller than the Earth itself and so small in fact that the orbit of the planets around it is no greater than the diameter of the Earth. For the record, there is no evidence that anything like this exists anywhere in the universe. But it does exist in Sheila Jackson Lee’s imagination. A place where the Moon is not only made up of gases, but is also a planet:

Now is probably a good time to tell you that this woman graduated from Yale. She’s a Yale graduate, a prominent congresswoman, and a former member of multiple science committees, yet she can’t even bull**** her way through a five minute presentation about the eclipse to a bunch of public school kids without diving headfirst into the most bizarre science fiction anyone has ever heard. This is like what would happen to me if I woke up one day and suddenly found myself standing in front of some sort of conference of mathematicians, expected to give a presentation about calculus. Except that I could probably get out at least one or two sentences before it becomes painfully obvious that I haven’t the slightest clue what I’m talking about. And also that’s calculus. In Shiela Jackson Lee’s case, she was asked to speak at a grade school level about the Moon, and couldn’t do it.

Fortunately she did fact check herself during her remarks, checking with someone to make sure her science was accurate. Watch:

She was near it. Yes, about as near as the Earth is to Pluto. Which according to Sheila Jackson Lee is probably about 14 and a half miles or so.

Now, there is no reason to belabor the point any more than I already have. The point is that this woman, quite literally, could not pass a first grade science exam. And yet she is a member of “the party of science,” and has been a prominent congresswoman in that party for 30 years. And lest you think that perhaps this woman has not always been this stupid. Perhaps she is just another member of our ruling political class who is suffering from dementia or some other form of brain damage. Consider that way back in 1997 it was reported that this same congresswoman, then a member of the House Committee on Science, visited the Mars Pathfinder Operations Center in Pasadena, California and asked whether the Pathfinder — on Mars — had been able to find the flag planted there by Neil Armstrong. This question was not caught on camera, so after it was reported Sheila Jackson Lee’s office accused the journalist of racism. But now we know, all these years later, that believing we visited and planted a flag on Mars is actually the least idiotic misconception this woman has about our solar system.

We are ruled by morons. By people who should not be trusted to walk across the room holding a pair of scissors. People who probably have to wear velcro shoes so that they aren’t caught on camera struggling to tie their shoes. These are the people running the country.

The good news is that maybe we can convince them all to board a rocket ship and take a trip to visit the Sun. I hear it’s nice this time of year. And that would solve a lot of our problems.

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