This isn’t a particularly illuminating six minutes, and it isn’t really Sen. John Kennedy’s best work in regulating some of the undesirables the Democrat Senate majority will drag in front of its committee hearings, but we thought we’d show it to you anyway just as an example of a few things.

Because the witness Kennedy tussles with in this segment from a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday of last week is Richard Painter, a MSNBC contributor and nonstop Twitter gadfly who nominally has a job as a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

Painter might be the most obnoxious guy on the American political scene, which is saying something. He regularly posts and says things which are so outrageous that in an America gone by he might well have found himself in a gunfight at dawn somewhere as a result. That he’s a law professor is a rather bizarre fact; the last thing we want in this world is lawyers trained by this guy.

What’s also somewhat significant about Painter is that, before he was vice-chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-wing outfit which used to make a big stink about corporate donations to Republicans before corporations went woke and left and now couldn’t care less about that issue, he was the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration from 2005 to 2007.

And that should tell you plenty about just how riddled with swamp creatures the Bush administration was. No Republican White House should ever employ a leftist loon like Richard Painter in anything like a position of responsibility.

But the hearing in question was about, essentially, how fossil fuels are destroying the planet. Somehow Painter is an expert on that subject (if you’ve paid any attention to him you’ll know that in his mind, there is no subject he’s not an expert on). Kennedy wasn’t buying it, and he figured he’d make a little mischief and assault Painter’s credibility by going back through the various calumnies and loony statements on his Twitter and elsewhere.

What happens next is a pretty good exposition of just how deficient some of the academic and political elites we have in this country truly are…