Barack Obama Stoled All The Rain In California And Gave It To Iran, Says Drunk John Boehner

Speaker of the Oompaloompas John Boehner took to the Facebook Tuesday to let America know why California has a drought. Now, you might think it has something to do with the decided lack of rain over the past few years, but you'd be fooling yourself. Nope, Boehner knows that the drought was caused by "liberal environmentalists’ backwards priorities" and of course Barack Obama:

Darn that Obama and his War on Lawns! Oh, look, there's even a link to some important news about how the House GOP will make it rain again! And what a surprise -- it's yet another variation on the old myth that environmentalists caused the drought by diverting all the water into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta just to keep some stupid fish, the Delta Smelt, from going extinct. If only all that water from rainy years had been caught by dams and stored (and, not incidentally, pumped to farms in the Central Valley), then California would still be green and everyone would be happy. It's pretty much the same pile of blame-the-fish-huggers nonsense that agricultural interests have been pushing since the earlier 2007-2009 drought, and just as it was in 2008, it's baloney. Somehow, Boehner doesn't even consider the alternate theory that the drought is God's punishment for abortion. 

But it turns out that there is a House bill that Boehner's pushing, the "Western Water & American Food Security Act" (H.R. 2898), which would build more dams to catch the rain that's not falling. As an  LA Times editorial notes, the bill, sponsored by Rep. David Valadao, isn't getting a public hearing, and while it wouldn't really increase California water supplies much, it would give Congress, not scientists, the power to decide how much water should be allowed to go from rivers into the Delta -- or as Republicans like to put it, "simply allowed to flow out to sea" instead of going onto almond orchards where it belongs. Just to add to the fun, Rep. Valdao has also said that his ultimate goal is to repeal the Endangered Species Act, so that dumb animals and their habitats could never hurt profits again.

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There's also a really good non-fish-related reason to keep fresh water flowing into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: If there's not enough fresh water inflow, salt water from San Francisco Bay could back up farther into the delta, which could endanger freshwater sources for cities and, yes, agriculture. Not that business interests have ever been willing to cause resource disasters in the pursuit of short term profits, of course.

As it happens, Chris Hayes had a little chat with Steve Fleischli, director of the water program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, about this very issue Wednesday:

Californians have always been fighting over water; we're certainly happy to know at last why that is: Once again, it's Obama and his time machine messing everything up. No doubt you can find him in the background of some scenes in Chinatown. 

[ John Boehner on Facebook / LA Times / MSNBC ]