The New Humanist has a yearly anti-award event, the Bad Faith Awards, given to the “most scurrilous enemy of reason” for the year. Last year, Dinesh D’Souza won; so far this year, two have been nominated, with more nominations to come. The two are Ann Coulter and, of course, Sarah Palin. They asked me to nominate someone, and I’m the wicked fellow who thought Palin was deserving…but perhaps they would have gotten a more persuasive nomination if they’d asked Jerry Coyne.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Anti-intellectualism has always been popular among certain portions of the American populace. Combined with Republican comments on “elitism,” McCain-Palin sneers at science are inevitable.
What I found particular annoying about Palin’s attack on fruit fly research is how the particular bit of research she derided is a bit of applied science on dealing with an agricultural pest. Olive growers probably aren’t part of Real America©.
Rush Limbaugh
A major force of divisiveness in our country.
A master of the Ad Hominem, who calls Obama “that punk”.
Who sets up a liberal strawman every morning, then spends 3 hours beating the crap out of it.
Who almost sobs at the media’s treatment of Joe the (unlicensed) Plumber who failed to pay his taxes.
Sarah Palin will probably win in a landslide but surely Elizabeth Dole deserves a dishonorable mention.
Andy Schlafly deserves a nomination for the Lenski affair
Wow…and even D’Souza realizes intelligent design is a failure.
Olive growers probably aren’t part of Real America©.
Well, duh. Olives? How elitist.
Strangely, in this video Christopher Hitchens seems to say good things about Dinesh D’Souza’s ability to debate atheism starting at about 0:40 in.
I agree with Kel that Andy Schlafly deserves recognition. Or would that involve too much attention being paid to a nonentity?
What about Michele Bachmann? She has so much religion in her head it collapsed into a black hole and sucked out her brain.
Michael Shermer has also praised D’Souza’s debating abilities.
Oh, oh. I shouldn’t have done that before breakfast. Now I’m slightly nauseated. I just jumped over to Conservapedia to bask in the warmth of their collective intellectual wattage. Oops! One of the news bits on Conservapedia’s front page reports that
The liberal science journal Nature has endorsed … you guessed it … fellow liberal Obama for President.
Did you know that Nature is a liberal magazine? I thought it was a science magazine, based on reality….
Oh, I just got it!
#10
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
-Stephen Colbert
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Exactly.
I nominate Ben Stein.
Can an entire group of people receive a Bad Faith Award? I would like to nominate the five billion theist retards who infest this planet. They’re all enemies of reason.
Is nobody going to suggest Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar? The man pumping vast amounts of money into distributing free copies of his ridiculous Atlas of Creation (the book that infamously used photos of fishing lures as examples of extant animals), as well as instigating country-wide blocking of any websites he disagrees with (richarddawkins.net included) surely deserves all the scorn that can possibly be heaped upon him.
I second, third, fourth, fifth… the nomination of Bennie Stein. There has never been a more cogent example of the whole (Sartrean) notion of “Bad Faith” than this drooling fool. He DEFINES “mauvais foi”: a traitor to his own education.
Fuck Scarah-cooter (“Do you think there’s time?”). There’ll be plenty more opportunity to stick it to that fatuous, feculent fluff…
Bennie Stein! Bennie Stein! Bennie Stein! Bennie Stein!
And even then Jerry merely mentioned a small fraction of what Drosophila research has yielded, especially with regard to useful tools – when we think about p-elements and transposon tagging etc. and what was gleaned from them – Jesus these people are stupid. I’d agree Ben Stein is more egregious than Palin but she’s got more people listening to her.
I think Ron Paul deserves at least a “highly commended” for recruiting an army of idiots to annoy anyone accessing internet blogs.
The most scurrilous enemies of reason would have to include the lying creationist retards of the Discovery Institute. The only purpose for their existence is to destroy science education.
John McCain deserves the Bad Faith Award for many reasons, including his desire to waste more lives and more taxpayer money in Iraq, his choice of a creationist retard for Vice-President, and his speech at a luncheon event co-presented by the Discovery Institute.
Also, apparently McCain is a creationist retard just like Palin.
When asked if intelligent design should be taught in science class, McCain said, “There’s enough scientists that believe it does. I’m not a scientist. This is something that I think all points of view should be presented.”
Yep, Ben Stein & Andy Schlafly, definitely.
DD’S was libeled, er, labeled the “worst enemy of reason”? How ironic. That must be for successfully debating celebrity atheists. It’s kinda like the way liberals define the term fascist: “a conservative who is winning an argument.”
Oh, good. Knight rides to the rescue. No, John, Dinesh is not dissed because of his debating chops. You may have noticed complimentary things said about D’Souza’s skills at polemics. No, Dinesh get criticized for his facile assumption that things he doesn’t understand are arguments for the existence of God. Oh, look! A universe! There must be a God.
And then there’s his wacky argument about free will. A classic coffee-spilling moment.
Adnan Oktar or however you spell his name. The Turkish creationist who got Dawkins’ site and books, blogger, and youtube banned.
#7 and #9
Since when did screaming at the top of your lungs count as debating abilities?
I nominate “Il Papa”, Ratzinger the Nazi rat, and all of his cracker-revering followers. Talk about a bad faith!
It’s kinda like the way liberals define the term fascist: “a conservative who is winning an argument.” John Moron Knight
Never happens, so how could you tell?
Not even close. Goldwater and Buckley were conservatives. Sarah Palin and you are christofascists.
Any Xian Dominionist of the American Taliban is a fascist. What else do you call someone who wants to overthrow the US government, scrap the constitution, and set up a theocratic dictatorship.
These have worked well throughout history and have produced the usual results in such places as Iran, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Since they inevitably lead to destruction, all Xian Dominionists are not only fascist but Nihilists.
John Knight
Oh, boo hoo, the nasty liberals are calling you names!
Of course conservatives NEVER call liberals names, do they? Liberals are never called socialists, communists, unpatriotic, unamerican, terrorist-sympathizers, are they?
What a thin-skinned hypocrite.
Olives are elitist? Then what about those little divided dishes, with the green olives on one side and the black olives on the other, that are mandatory on every middle-American Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner table? What can we substitute, that says so clearly “There must be some exotic food on this festive table, but I don’t want to know anything about real olives” ?
If Hitchens ever spoke kindly of D’Souza’s debating skills, then either he, Hitchens, was too drunk to think clearly or he hadn’t consumed enough alcohol to power his fuel cells (I’m not quite sure which way it works with him).
“most scurrilous enemy of reason”
It could be argued that Palin helped science and reason the way syphilis helped penicillin. Just think of Palin as a folksy kind of syphilis.
Real Americans™ cook with Crisco! They don’t need any of that fancy cold-pressed extra-*hushed whisper*virgin elitist nonsense!
Dinesh cracks me up.
In particular when he mentions that his family was made christian at the point of a bayonet.
Cheney blows them all out of the water. Incidentally, his first name is Richard. Dick is an honorary title.
Another anti-reason name: Bill Donohue
On the basis of pure ignorance in the past year, I don’t think anyone can top Ben “Darwinism doesn’t explain gravity” Stein.
Shlafly is a close second, but at least he was able to compose a letter to PNAS that looked superficially like he might have a point. Stein is just a drooling moron.
Whether it is Palin or Coulter, I’m sure either will wear the badge with honor. It will probably help their Christian wacko street cred.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned George W.(Wacho)Bush.
As a European I’m quite pleased to see that all candidates hail from your Hemisphere.
With the exception of Dinesh (partial exception), he plies his trade in the fertile land of the Bible Belt.
Sean Hannity.
Bill O’Reilly.
The latest Hitchens debate video over on Dawkins site has me rather worried about poor old Hitch. He was totally off his game. He wondered and hesitated often. There was so little fight in him it got painful to watch.
The people behind “The Secret”. The others listed come from well-established religions; they have just reinforced people’s existing antireason. “The Secret” has given people a way of being dumb that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to them.
OT (and I posted on the old thread about this from when Dick Dawks retirement was announced, sorry): Oxford have announced Dawkins’ replacement in the Simonyi chair of public understanding of science. It’s pure mathematician (and bestselling populizer) Marcus du Sautoy . Yay for maths.
How about a Lifetime Achievement Award for Berlinski? Sample quote:
@#24
I did preface my comment with “Strangely” for a reason. :)
I’d like to nominate the Republican Party. I just receive a mailer from the RP of Florida that states “America has proven oil reserves that match what is in all of Saudi Arabia”. Well, not according to this.
Unless, of course, you match each barrel of American oil to 12 barrels of Saudi oil. American oil is 12 times as good Saudi oil…
Why do you hate America?
Seriously, I will be so glad when next Wednesday rolls around. Then I won’t have to listen to politicians making special efforts to lie and only have to listen to the regularly scheduled political lies.
Holy Shit, Canada has the second largest oil reserve in the world? Dammit, if McCain wins I know where he’ll be pointing his guns.
Oh, you’re just reading the mailer wrong. And you’re reading that table wrong.
America – as in, the combined continents of North and South America.
Can you say “Manifest Destiny”? I knew you could!
Yeah, I guess if you loosely define “match” and “America”, the continent of North America comes close. Another line says “Drilling for American oil will lower prices and provide thousands of American jobs.” I wonder what the Canadians would have to say when congress starts passing out drilling permits in Canada?
I am sure that the remaining residents of the 51st-60th states will be glad to have the work.
BTW, more seriously: The oil in Canada is not in wells that are drilled, but in tar sands that have to be mined and processed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabasca_Oil_Sands
Sarah Palin says that journalists investigating and commenting on her attacks instead of simply parroting them as revelatory truth threatens her right to free speech
I don’t see how you can uphold the constitution if you don’t understand it.
I pretty much figured that. BTW, here is a photo of the mailer.
James Dobson.
I would say that the award should go to the US news media for doing little or no critical reporting of Obama.
Maybe next year.
So then, where did you learn of the prophecy that Obama’s followers intend to make the streets run red with blood upon Obama losing the Presidential Election?
On the heels of Coyne’s trenchant commentary, an endorsement of sorts from yours truly.
I second Father Nature’s (#3) nomination of Liddy (“Run! Godless Americans!”) Dole.
“So then, where did you learn of the prophecy that Obama’s followers intend to make the streets run red with blood upon Obama losing the Presidential Election?”
That wasn’t the news media, that was from a good liberal feminst Erica Jong. http://www.observer.com/2008/politics/erica-jong-tells-italians-obama-loss-will-spark-second-american-civil-war-blood-will-r
But at least one reactionary repthugacan news rag made comment on Erica’s statement.
Too bad it’s the 1st, Donovan. I’ll prolly have forgotten that quip when the November Mollies come around. (And with any luck I’ll have drunk my brains out in celebration come Weds – or in trying to forget with no luck …)
But for now I guffaw.
Thank you for your concern Eric A.
We’ll let you and your buddies cast all the stones you want at Ms. Jong (The literary world will just have to handle this token sacrifice since she has been so relevant lately).
Feel better now?
I figure to let you libs throw Erica from the bus.
She just couldn’t keep her mouth shut.
Eric A.:
“She just couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”
Let’s see a show of hands from those who see Eric’s statement as comically ironic?
Irony is overrated.
I’ll give you Liz Dole, but Palin is way smarter and more fundamentally sound than both the erratic walking blunder Biden, and the reparation president Obama and Ann Coulter has accomplished exactly what she set out to do, get under the skin of the “too queer” and out of the social norm. Admit, get used to it, they are here, they are not queer and they are the majority.
I NOMINATE DUBYA, “W”.
Well if she didn’t break the shackle on her ankle and free herself from the kitchen (I want pie damnit!) then we wouldn’t have to go to such extreme measures… :P
I admit that the essence of Jerry Coyne’s article is spot on. As a scientist I share the view that Palin and the other “the-Bible-is-really-a-documentary”-loons really can threaten scientific advance if they are allowed to go through with their creationist, religious and fairy-tale based anti-science agenda. But as an autist (Asperger’s syndrome) I don’t really care for his reference to autism as a “disease” that can be “cured”. It gives me the same bad vibes as I get whenever I see one of those raving pastors making the same claims about homosexuality or start ranting about Intelligent Design (no, I’m not gay, but I am a scientist in the field of, among other things, evolution). I thought that the whole Jenny McCarthy issue had rectified those bizarre opinions once and for all, but I guess not. So, since it seems appropriate, here’s the link to the “Stop Jenny McCarthy” website with all the info you need.
http://www.site.stopjenny.com/
And BTW, I second PZ’s nomination of Sarah Palin. Pleeeeease don’t send her to the White House. I beg you. If not for your country, then maybe for me? :)
Deborah Harry:
Punctuation can make rambling incoherence palatable… or not.
Actually christofascist wingnut morons only run around 7 to 20% of the population according to which poll you read.
Their star is fading. Even conservatives want to get rid of fundie morons.
50% – More Conservatives Now Say Churches Should Stay Out of Politics Wed Sep 24, 12:00 AM ET
Half of self-described conservatives now express the view that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics; four years ago, only 30% of conservatives expressed this view. Overall, a new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds a narrow majority of the public (52%) now says that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had voiced support for religious institutions speaking out on such issues. The survey also finds that most of the reconsideration of the desirability of religious involvement in politics has occurred among conservatives. As a result, conservatives’ views on this issue are much more in line with the views of moderates and liberals than was previously the case. Similarly, the sharp divisions between Republicans and Democrats that previously existed on this issue have disappeared. There are other signs in the new poll about a potential change in the climate of opinion about mixing religion and politics. First, the survey finds a small but significant increase since 2004 in the percentage of respondents saying that they are uncomfortable when they hear politicians talk about how religious they are — from 40% to 46%. Again, the increase in negative sentiment about religion and politics is much more apparent among Republicans than among Democrats.
Sorry Deborah. When you factor in fundie morons who are ignorant, stupid and hate a lot, the numbers get pretty small. You are a decided minority and not a well regarded one even by the majority of xians.
Dear Lead Singer of Blondie (#66),
“Palin is way smarter”
I could go with you that many words’ worth, but to not follow said quartet of words with “than a sweet and sour pickle chip” or “than a stepped-on Dixie cup full of snot” is just wrong.
Nothing I have heard (or read about) proceeding from the festering pie-hole Palin has in lieu of a “mouth” indicates to me that she has the qualifications necessary to manage a Waffle House, let alone a state or a whole real country.
Ben Stein should get the Bad Faith Award nomination for his dominance in two categories; anti-evolution nuttery and economic wackaloonery.
Just today I received a political mailer from the “Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania-Victory 2008” with this quote bleating from the cover:
Prostituting his D-list celebrity status to advance the political agenda of the Repubs and the (again, political) agenda of the Disco Tute, Ben Stein must be our nominee!
Deborah Harry: “the reparation president Obama”
Oh, but opposition to Obama doesn’t having anything to do with race, right?
Obama is on record for quite a while as opposing slavery reparations.
Thanks for the tacit admission that Obama has the election in the bag, though.
Kel – What kind of pie do you want?
I suppose you want fried chicken, cheese grits and fried green tomaters to go with that pie. Biscuits and gravy on the side too, no doubt.
Better have a care there Kel, you’ll founder if you keep tying on the feed bag like that. *nudge, nudge*
I don’t know, I’m just going to throw it out anyway.
I know what some of those things are – and while I don’t know what ‘biscuits’ in the US are, I know they aren’t what we (in Australia) call biscuits, which are what you called ‘cookies’ or ‘crackers’ (hah!) depending on whether they’re sweet or savoury; here, ‘biscuit’ can apply to either.
What’s a ‘cheese grit’?
Sacrilege! Throw out pie?!
Don’t write that Kel. I’m over 50, my heart can’t take it.
Surely, even among atheists throwing out pie has got to be considered a blasphemous sin.
Strong spirits are required to burn away such an unholy statement. humf!
Wowbagger – In the USA biscuits are usually baking soda biscuits, spread with butter, honey, jam – or ladled thickly with gravy for breakfast or supper.
Grits are ground hominy. They are boiled and served in several ways. Cheese grits are boiled grits that are then put into a casserole dish covered in your choice of cheese and baked. I like Tillamook extra sharp smoked cheddar, because I live in the same state as the Tillamook cheese factory, Rev. BigDumbChimp likes blue cheese grits. This is considered by most folks to be Southern style cooking.
One of my brothers cooks up a mean bacon & tomato gravy that he serves over biscuits for supper. Always a big hit with folks.
Sheesh, now I sound like MAJeff! ;o)
The pie is merely a symbol of subservience, so it matters not it’s fate.
Regarding Ben Stein, I recently read an interesting deconversion story which included:
Patricia, “Grits are ground hominy.” is not particularly explanatory to Aussies. What’s hominy? ;)
(that last was jocular; I’ve looked it up in the past)
Antonio @ 39
Don’t feel too smug over there on the other side of the pond.
We could probably come up with a few Europeans candidates if we wanted to.
For Starters Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar comes to mind for denial of anthropogenic global warming.
I guess Il Papa is out because the Vatican is it’s own nation state. Though we could say he was German at one time.
The UK has a few good candidates as well.
Oh, I do beg your pardon. Grits – white degermed, ground corn.
It’s the notes that goes under the mellidy. ;)
<slaps noncarborundum upside the head>
Sarah Palin for the award..definately!
Sarah’s conversation with the French President.
http://willrhodesportmanteau.com/2008/11/01/uh-oh-canada-comedians-get-to-speak-to-palin/
Sometimes people on the left are the enemies of reason, so I’ll nominate Illinois State Representative Monique “It’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists” Davis.
And give an honorable mention to internet crocodile tear maestro Yomin Postelnik.
*Slaps noncarborundum up the other side of the head*
It’s corn, child, CORN!
Kel – you have lost me. I cannot follow your thinking.
But, that tickles the crap out of me, because I am sometimes accused of being non understandable myself.
Happens to the best of people, I make a habit of being completely deadpan when attempting humour. As a result I just creep people out and everyone takes me way too seriously.
But in an attempt to explain my thought process, I was making a pop culture reference to South Park (Cartman says: bitch, get back in the kitchen and make me some pie). But I can’t just say that, I need to make it abstract; it’s more fun to me that way. But really it’s to mock yet another of Eric Atkinson’s absurd comments about liberals and the left.
Patricia, my grandmother from Tennessee would make chocolate gravy to put over biscuits for the grandchildren. My mother still makes a batch of chocolate gravy for me when I visit her.
Do you have the recipe for this chocolate gravy, and if so, would you be willing to trade it for a recipe for crucified trout (with pictures)?
Jenny McCarthy should be ahead of most of the names I’ve read here. Sara Palin is just a stupid woman. Jenny McCarthy is ACTIVELY trying to hard children! Palin and all the other politicians my do so as a consequence of their actions but this McCarthy freak is ACTIVELY encouraging it.
I look at the domain and it says “scienceblogs.com” not “politicalblogs.com”. Obviously ’tis the season for politics but c’mon no way the idiot from Alaska is worse than the idiot in hollywood.
Stanton, chocolate gravy is essentially a white gravy with Hershey’s baking cocoa and sugar added. It has flour, cocoa, sugar, milk/water, and some bacon grease/crisco/butter/margarine to thicken it. When cold, it’s almost a chocolate pudding. I’ll look around and see if I can find my attempt to make it, or I’ll call my mother and see if she ever wrote anything down. My grandmother’s idea of measuring included things like “large cup of flour”.
An androgynous associate of a rap artist?
Ahh, There you loose me Kel cause I don’t know about South Park. I’ve heard it’s funny and naughty. I’m stuck in Cervantes & Balzac. Sorry!
Chocolate gravy – now there you have one over one me. But anything with Crisco or bacon grease can’t be all bad.
Bacon grease is also good on wilted lettuce. All hale bacon!
Ben Stein gets my vote. Putting a 4-star endorsement on the front of the package of his own flamingly st00pid movie is a move that would make an amoeba cringe.
Wrong! Real Americans™ cook with lard or bacon grease.
And don’t anyone be dissing olives. 90-some-odd percent of the olives we eat here come from California.
Oh, waitaminnit. Californians aren’t Real Americans™. And that’s before the state falls off into the ocean.
Oh, c’mon. This is easy. It’s the gaggle of asshats at the Creation Museum. This was their year. They claimed that Beowulf supports their view that men and dinosaurs lived together, probably interbreeding. They claimed unicorns were real. They started the Answers Research Journal, a “peer” “reviewed” creationist “journal.” Oh, and they opened their novelty Creation theme park.
Next question.
HJ
Patricia @ #97:
“Bacon grease is also good on wilted lettuce. All hale bacon!”
Bacon grease also has the same balance of poly-/monounsaturated/saturated fat as olive oil. Hard sell to a health food nut, but there it is.
Maybe when Palin lets the fruit flies kill all the olives, the famous healthy “Mediterranean Diet” will switch to bacon grease? One can only hope!
Ann Coulter is old news these days. I haven’t seen her on TV in a long time. Palin may not be as bad as Sen. Elizabeth Dole who has proven that the Republican base is mostly stupid bigots.
The latest Hitchens debate video over on Dawkins site has me rather worried about poor old Hitch. He was totally off his game. He wondered and hesitated often. There was so little fight in him it got painful to watch. – Patricia
Korsakov syndrome?
“America has proven oil reserves that match what is in all of Saudi Arabia” – Rethuglican Party leaflet, quoted by Don Smith FCD
Maybe they’re using “America” to cover the entire western hemisphere, and are aiming to conquer it if elected?
Re #103 – sorry, should have read the next few comments after Don’s!
What’s a ‘cheese grit’? – Kel
Isn’t it obvious? You know like they make cheese with garlic, cheese with herbs, even cheese with marmalade these days – well, this is cheese with grit – for the crunchiness, I suppose.
Let’s see now, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil were still all part of The Americas last I checked. I’m sure the people running America today figure those countries are just their colonies and their oil belongs to us. God told them so!
noncarborundum:
I do wish people would keep things contrapuntal around here.
I nominate Bobby “the exorcist” Jindal
Is there a “CosmicKismet” award? Because here is a flip of great import I guess;
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/?xrail
Hart has been an important paternal presence in conservative circles for half a century. Now 78, he is a professor emeritus at Dartmouth. The Dartmouth Review, the first and hardiest of the “underground” conservative student papers, held its earliest editorial meetings in his living room. He mentored several future stars of conservative opinion-mongering, including Dinesh D’Souza, Gregory Fossedal, and Laura Ingraham.
Snip and worth posting the whole thing;
Hart is a Burkean. His disenchantment with the anti-intellectual, Christianist, and imperial-triumphalist strains of the conservative movement has been growing for some time. This year he is an Obamacon. Thus, for the moment, we find ourselves on the same side, albeit for different (though sometimes overlapping) reasons.
Here’s Hart in today’s Daily Beast:
Republican President George W. Bush has not been a conservative at all, either in domestic policy or in foreign policy. He invaded Iraq on the basis of abstract theory, the very thing Burke warned against. Bush aimed to turn Iraq into a democracy, “a beacon of liberty in the Middle East,” as he explained in a radio address in April 2006.
I do not recall any “conservative” publication mentioning those now memorable words “Sunni,” “Shia,” or “Kurds.” Burke would have been appalled at the blindness to history and to social facts that characterized the writing of those so-called conservatives.
Obama did understand. In his now famous 2002 speech, while he was still a state senator in Illinois, he said: “I know that a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, of undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without international support will fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I’m not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”
Burke would have agreed entirely, and admired the cogency of so few words. And one thing I know is that both Nixon and Reagan would have agreed. Both were prudential and successful conservatives. But all the organs of the conservative movement followed Bush over the cliff–as did John McCain.
Hart concludes his essay with some observations on embryonic stem-cell research, to which, as he notes, “the conservative movement publications, following Bush, have been fiercely opposed.”
Such opposition required a belief that a cluster of cells (the embryo) the size of the period at the end of this sentence is as important (more important?) than a seriously ill human being.
I myself cannot fathom such a mentality…
Recently, Harvard announced a program that will be part of a multi-billion dollar science center to be established south of the Charles River, and will be able to supply stem cells to other laboratories. I call that Pro-Life.
This analysis could be extended, but it seems clear to me that Obama is the conservative in the 2008 election.
The astonishing thing is that Obama is also the liberal in the 2008 election.
The truth is that Obama is the only candidate in the 2008 election who thinks seriously enough and analytically enough to be considered either a conservative or a liberal.
As for Hart, he’s not opposed to all conservatives. He’s opposed to dumb conservatives. Substituting “liberals” for “conservatives,” I concur. Perhaps this could be the basis for an Unpopular Front.
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg
In
• Hendrik Hertzberg
• | Campaign ’08
George W. Bush has not been a conservative at all, either in domestic policy or in foreign policy. He invaded Iraq on the basis of abstract theory – Some guy caled Hart, quoted by Sondra
Hart shows he hasn’t a clue about the neocons: “turning Iraq into a democracy” was just an excuse. The aims of the invasion were control of oil supplies and military bases – observe how they have actually behaved, and see the PNAC document Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century (2000), which made clear that US control of Iraq was a key aim, regardless of Saddam Hussein. Whether Burke would have approved of this kind of imperialism I don’t know – although he was involved in prosecuting Warren Hastings for oppressive behaviour in India.
Conservative politics has gotten really really conservative. It’s like anyone who doesn’t match the extreme of conservatism isn’t a true conservative. No wonder they denounce democrats as socialists, anything to the left of their views must appear as marxist
There are so many qualified candidates for the Bad Faith Awards that maybe we should be inclusive and break them down by categories, like the Oscars or the Grammys. Why pit the likes of Ben Stein, Sarah Palin, Dinesh D’Souza, Rush Limbaugh, Ken Ham, and Andrew Schlafly against one another when they’re not only all so deserving, but showcase their rare talents across such a diverse array of media?
@ the culinary subthread: Mmmmm, bacon grease. Good for what ails ya. Mmmmm, olive oil. Ditto. Also olives in all their glorious variety. And olive trees, who are really fun to prune and get so gorgeous when they’re old.
Grits = polenta by other means.
Cheese grits, at least in this household, involve grits and eggs and butter and cheese and come out of the oven with a strong resemblance to souffle. I married well.
‘sides, a good Christian just wants to find one virgin and settle down and raise a family – but them Muslim terrorist types want 72 of ’em after they die. 72 sounds pretty “extra.” So people that use “extra virgin” olive-oil are Muslim terrorists!