To the shock of nobody, Speaker Mike Johnson has already proven himself to be a contemptible little man, pitching a crackpot deal to fund aid for Israel by swiping the money from the bolstered IRS program that cracks down on rich tax cheaters.
Surely Johnson must know that by letting the rich off the hook, it shifts the tax burden to the middle class, right? Maybe he consulted his Bible and found a comforting passage – something like, “Be not honest about what thee knows, lest it enlighten even those in thrall to thou.”
But what fascinates me most about Speaker Mike is his Biblical devotion to the dinosaurs. It’s kind of funny, until we examine it closely.
Given the MAGA GOP’s steady descent into madness, I suppose it’s no surprise that the cult would award the speaker’s gavel to a guy who thinks the earth is only 6,000 years old and thinks that prehistoric creatures hitched rides on Noah’s Ark. But hey, the Book of Genesis says that on the sixth day of creation all land animals, humans and dinosaurs alike, were created at the same time; as Mike decreed unto us in a 2021 interview, the ark episode “is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”
I’ve got say, that’s quite a brain twister.
That’s what they teach at the Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky. Mike is personally and professionally close to Answers in Genesis, the group that founded the park; prior to his House career, Mike did legal work for the park. He and the group sing the same hymn. The group says that what’s written in Genesis, about the dinosaurs and everything else, “is a simple but factual presentation of actual events.”
For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the fact the Earth is scientifically estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, and that dinosaurs predated humans by roughly 65 million years (according to geological findings). As Janet Kellogg Ray, an adjunct biology professor in Texas has written, “The timeline just doesn’t work.” But even if we contrive to ignore the timeline, and instead take Speaker Mike at his word, we’re still stuck with a serious conundrum:
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