Tommy Denton

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Because back benches exist, somebody has to occupy them.

Those who sit there may be either active or passive in the conduct of their business, but because of their obtuseness, cluelessness, irrelevance or general ineffectiveness, they remain consigned to back-bench status.

Granted, a few back-benchers are allowed certain perks by their superiors for appearances' sake, such as a titular chairmanship, but those sinecures seldom involve grave responsibilities upon which the fate of the republic depends.

The performance of back-benchers came to the fore last week as Al Gore appeared before congressional committees to present his case for reversing government actions and personal behaviors that are contributing to global climate change.

On the House of Representatives side of Capitol Hill last Wednesday, before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, he met with vigorous questions from Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who trotted out the usual denunciations of scientific evidence for the deleterious effects of the human contributions to the planet's "fever," in Gore's term.

In the 22 years since the apparently satisfied voters in the 6th Congressional District of Texas first elected him, Barton has continued to exhibit a determined disinclination to examine the fruits of the scientific method that deviate from the ambitions of the oil industry for which he remains a devoted apologist and slavish steward.

Repudiating the science Gore and virtually every competent involved scientist supports, Barton chided the evidence of global warming as "uneven and evolving."

"You're not just off a little, you're totally wrong," he said of Gore's conclusions that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming. Barton then said, employing the exaggerated alarm common to arguments short on reason, that freezing carbon emissions would harm Americans and lead to "no new industry, no new people and no new cars."

As hyperbolic as Barton's interrogation may have been, it was the model of rational clarity compared with the fulminations of Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Among Inhofe's observations as he confronted Gore -- a presentation laced liberally with Inhofe's rude, bullying interruptions -- was his characterization of global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

That's a pretty wide-ranging calculus, considering all the hoaxes perpetrated on the American people, but it's fast becoming part of Inhofe's standard spiel.

To provide some context for the remark and its author's general ideological predisposition, consider the senator's remarks earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:

"I have been called -- my kids are aware of this -- dumb, crazy man, science abuser, Holocaust denier, villain of the month, hate-filled, warmonger, Neanderthal, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun," Inhofe said, as reported by The Washington Post. "And I can just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly."

For an idea of how competitive efforts at outrageous excess apparently became during the CPAC conference, back-bencher U.S. Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, said of Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq: "She's an idiot."

Such is the level of analytical discipline that helps to shape the preparation of some members of Congress to probe the challenges that confront the republic whose destiny has been placed in their care.

Fortunately, a sense of humor in the face of the clear and present danger posed by some back-benchers can help neutralize a concerned citizen's anxiety and frustration. The Wall Street Journal reported that, in response to Inhofe's outburst last week, blogger Lou Grinzo has created "The Inhofe Scale" to measure statements "that exhibit a noticeable and willing detachment from reality."

The scale uses Inhofe as the prime measure at 100, with 30 to 50 applying to those who refuse to see the gradual effect of such phenomena as peak oil, and 100 to 200 applying to what Grinzo calls "Apocalypticons," the extremist range of doomsayers, many of them misanthropes, who see the abrupt end of the world as we know it.

Still, the Joe Bartons, Jim Inhofes and Sam Johnsons of the American political experiment present an awfully strong argument against the theory of representative government. More than a sense of humor among voters will be necessary to keep the argument from becoming more persuasive.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.