No matter how wrong she is on a host of issues, Texas State Board of Education candidate Mary Lou Bruner probably thinks she really would help Texas children get the best education possible and go on to succeed in life.
Here’s the problem: She cares more about pushing her own bizarre political agenda.
She’s a partisan ideologue. Here’s the even bigger problem: She’ll read something, or is told something by some random dude, and — if it fits her political agenda — she’ll run with it, no other fact-checking necessary. That trait was on display earlier this month when she told a group that teacher shortages were such a big problem, that the Lufkin Independent School District had started the current school year with a shortage of 91 qualified teachers that was being filled with full-time substitute teachers. The Lufkin ISD superintendent, who happened to be in the room and would know these things, assured Bruner that the district had a full slate of qualified teachers. Bruner countered that she knew the district was short 91 teachers when the school year started because some random dude living in Lufkin ISD told her that was the case.
That brings us to Bruner’s latest whopper, in which she assures us that: “We’re about to win that (global warming) battle.” Somewhere there’s a poor starving polar bear who would beg to differ.
Here’s what Bruner told the Longview News-Journal about climate change, which she has called a hoax created by Karl Marx:
“At the very least, we need to be able to teach the weaknesses of evolution as well as the strengths,” she said. “We’re about to win that (global warming) battle, because so many professionals feel ashamed that they misled the public. More weathermen are coming out and telling the truth.”
She gave KETK News Director Neal Barton as an example of such “weathermen.”
We’ll leave the creationist, anti-evolution rhetoric alone for now because that’s not a new sentiment from Bruner. But you’re probably asking: “Who in the world is Neal Barton?”. We thought the same thing and went looking. Barton is, as the paper described him, the news director at TV station KETK in Tyler, Texas. But no, he doesn’t appear to be a weatherman as Bruner described him. The top thing to come up (other than the station’s web page and Barton’s Facebook profile) when you search for Barton is a 2014 anti-science rant against climate change Barton gave on the air in 2014. The Texas Observer noted that the rant was a) bizarre and b) apparently plagiarized.
So here’s Bruner once again basing her views at least partially on what one person — a TV station news director — said. Of course, when Bruner says people like her are “about to win” the battle on global warming, she means the political battle. Unfortunately for all us, the planet doesn’t care about politics. Last month was the hottest April on record, and that puts 2016 on course to be the hottest year in recorded history “by the biggest margin ever.”
But sure, let’s go ahead and tell Texas schoolchildren that the whole thing is a Marxist hoax.
