Sometimes Congressmen really are that stupid

A friend forwarded me a purported news article in which members of the Obama administration supposedly responded to an automotive engineer's reference to the "laws of physics" by saying, "These laws of physics? Whose rules are those? We need to change that. We have the congress and administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order..."

Now this is a fun story and I'm all in favor of making fun of self-important government officials, but it practically screamed "bullshit." So I hopped onto the indispensable snopes.com, and sure enough it's a scam...BUT - BUT - wait a minute, there's a big BUT here (um, perhaps I should rephrase that...too late).

The engineer in question, a David Cole, was contacted by snopes, and, as I expected, said that the story wasn't exactly true. But then, to my delight, he added that it wasn't completely made up...it just wasn't Obama's people who wanted to repeal the laws of physics:

I have not met personally with the Obama Auto Task Force. The comments related to the "laws of physics" came from a discussion I had a number of years ago with several congressmen who said that we should pass a new 2nd law of thermodynamics.

[cackling delightedly] So it's not actually a myth! It was just the legislative branch rather than the executive. So I suppose that one could argue that the point of the original piece still stands... "And these are the same people who are going to fix healthcare?!"