The Parade of Clowns – The Latest Comic Flourishes

Sometimes it’s like shooting fish in barrel – which is of course an odd idea, but that is what one says when something is just too easy.  Everyone knows the term, and curiously, here you can bid on a 1952 American Kitchens print advertisement featuring a boy actually shooting fish in barrel.  Who would want to do that?  It doesn’t look like much fun.  But it is so very tempting with politicians.  Will Rogers made a career of it – “There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”

 

Well, he did say this – “I don’t make jokes; I just watch the government and report the facts.”  So let’s get to what’s up with the current crop of politicians, now that Will Rogers is long gone.

 

George Will – the steady and sure voice of conservatism, before it got all screwy and he was exiled to the obscurity to Sunday mornings on ABC – is up first, on Fred Thompson, the former undistinguished and rather obscure senator who left politics to return to acting in movies and on television (he does have a great voice – good pipes as they say in the trade), and now is seen as the man who will step in and save the Republican Party as its next presidential candidate –

 

Tulip mania gripped Holland in the 1630s. Prices soared, speculation raged, bulbs promising especially exotic or intense colors became the objects of such frenzied bidding that some changed hands 10 times in a day. Then, suddenly, the spell was broken, the market crashed – prices plummeted in some cases to one one-hundredth of what they had been just days before. And when Reason was restored to her throne, no one could explain what the excitement had been about. Speaking of Fred Thompson …”

 

That’s not nice.  But George Will tells you what he sees –

 

In a recent speech, Thompson expressed a truly distinctive idea about immigration. Referring to the 1986 amnesty measure that Reagan signed into law, he said: “Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women and children around the world.”

 

Kids, do not try to deconstruct that thought at home; this is a task for professionals.

 

Okay then – that’s how he sees what we have now.  We are beset by these suicidal maniacs out to kill countless innocents here and everywhere, and implies there may be twelve million of them, if you think about it, cleverly picking our crops, cleaning our hotel rooms, parking our cars, and who knows what, while plotting massive death to us all.  That’ll mess your head the next time you’re at the carwash on Ventura Boulevard.  Take a gun.  This man is messed up.

 

Oh, he may not believe this.  He may only think that we all should think about things this way, and that if we do think about things this way he’ll get the nomination and then the votes he needs.  But then he may really believe this.  It’s hard to tell.

 

Andrew Sullivan, who tagged the Will commentary, is amazed at what this says about things on that side of the political fence – “I have yet to see an iota of evidence that Thompson’s candidacy is any more than a manifestation of complete Republican panic and bankruptcy.”

 

Maybe so, but one fellow who is actually running, and doing well, Mitt Romney, the devout Mormon, is also saying odd things –

 

Another case arose when George Stephanopoulos of ABC News asked Mr. Romney about a Mormon teaching that Jesus will come to the United States when he returns to reign on earth. Mr. Romney responded that the Messiah will return to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, “the same as the other Christian tradition.”

 

Mr. Grover said some of his radio listeners were astounded.

                     

“They were just in disbelief, saying that’s not true, Jesus is coming back to Missouri,” Mr. Grover said. “It’s the Latter Day Saints Church’s 10th article of faith that Zion will be built upon the American continent.”

 

It is rather astounding that to win the nomination Romney has to tap-dance around the actual location of Jesus’ return – but that’s where we are these days.  The niceties of theological prophecy have become something one must work into one’s political platform.  And those central doctrines of Mormonism have become an issue.  He did have to explain the polygamy thing – but since the church dropped that a bit back he could say it was simply history, and doesn’t really matter now, as Utah no longer needs a load of cheerful children to create a viable community, and it’s really a bad, bad thing.  Whatever.

 

Here Sullivan is angry – “He’ll say anything, remember, and pretend to believe anything to gain power.”  Yes – and your point is what, exactly?

 

Sullivan, a devout Catholic, of course takes religion seriously.  That’s asking for trouble.  As for when or even if Jesus returns – and precisely where he will return – some of us are pulling for Finland.  Why not?  Crank up some Sibelius.  It would be nice.  But Jesus may not come back.  He may be busy.  He may have moved on.

 

As for saying anything, the president still leads the way.  As the only sitting president who has ever visited Albania, while there on 10 June, he had some things to say about independence for Kosovo –

 

“At some point in time, sooner rather than later, you’ve got to say, ‘Enough is enough – Kosovo is independent,’” Mr. Bush said. “In terms of a deadline, there needs to be one. It needs to happen.”

 

But on Sunday, Mr. Bush tried to backtrack when asked when that deadline might be. “First of all, I don’t think I called for a deadline,” Mr. Bush said, during a press appearance with Mr. Berisha in the courtyard of a government ministry building. He was reminded that he had.

 

“I did?” he asked, sounding surprised. “What exactly did I say? I said deadline? O.K., yes, then I meant what I said.” The reporters laughed.

 

Kevin Drum is no Will Rogers –

 

Look, I’ll admit that my sense of humor has been stretched to the breaking point over the past few years. But is it really too much to ask the president of the United States to take his own policies seriously enough to actually know what they are?

 

As a public service, simple answers to simple questions – “Yes.”  The man says things.  One is not to take them too seriously.  He certainly doesn’t.  Everyone else got that long ago.

 

Even the courts are starting to get it – holding enemy combatants indefinitely in military prisons is bullshit –

 

In a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism, a federal appeals court ordered the Pentagon to release a man being held as an enemy combatant.

 

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, “even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution –  and the country.”

 

… [Ali al-Marri], whom the government calls a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda, was arrested on Dec. 12, 2001, in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science at Bradley University.

 

… A dissenting judge in today’s decision, Henry E. Hudson, visiting from the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, wrote that President Bush “had the authority to detain al-Marri as an enemy combatant or belligerent” because “he is the type of stealth warrior used by Al Qaeda to perpetrate terrorist acts against the United States.”

 

But Kevin Drum says Hudson should be ashamed of himself –

 

Al-Marri might be “the type of stealth warrior used by Al Qaeda,” but nobody’s denying that. The question at hand is whether the federal government is allowed to simply assert this indefinitely without evidence.

 

Question: Will the Bush administration allow al-Marri a trial, or will they appeal this to the Supreme Court and risk an adverse ruling? In the past they’ve played every legal game in the book to avoid the possibility of a definitive decision, but time may be running out. Eventually the Supremes are going to rule on this, and this might be the time. Stay tuned.

 

But wait!  There more!

 

Marty Lederman here points out the critical detail in the al-Marri case – the Bush administration moved him from criminal to military detention solely in order to torture him, or so it would appear.

 

The court said this –

 

The Government’s treatment of others [in the criminal justice system] renders its decision to halt al-Marri’s criminal prosecution – on the eve of a pre-trial hearing on a suppression motion – puzzling at best. Al-Marri contends that the Government has subjected him to indefinite military detention, rather than see his criminal prosecution to the end, in order to interrogate him without the strictures of criminal process. We trust that this is not so, for such a stratagem would contravene Hamdi’s injunction that “indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized.” 542 U.S. at 521.

 

We note, however, that not only has the Government offered no other explanation for abandoning al-Marri’s prosecution, it has even propounded an affidavit in support of al-Marri’s continued military detention stating that he “possesses information of high intelligence value.” See Rapp Declaration. Moreover, former Attorney General John Ashcroft has explained that the Government decided to declare al-Marri an “enemy combatant” only after he became a “hard case” by “reject[ing] numerous offers to improve his lot by … providing information.” John Ashcroft, Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice 168-69 (2006).

 

It does look like they decided to detain him in order to torture him.  That’s not exactly constitutional, and not very nice, and of course ridiculously ineffective.

 

Colin Powell, the day before the ruling, on NBC’s Meet the Press, was calling the bullshit (video clip here) –

 

Guantanamo has become a major, a major problem for America’s perception as it’s seen – the way the world perceives America. And if it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, this afternoon. I’d close it. And I’d not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was well, then they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them.

 

Isn’t that what our system’s all about? And by the way, America, unfortunately, has two million people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus. And so we can handle bad people in our system. And so I would get rid of Guantanamo and I’d get rid of the military commissions system, and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts martial. I would do that because I think it’s more equitable and it’s more understandable in constitutional terms. But I’d also do it because every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds.

 

And so essentially we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it. But remember what I started this discussion saying, don’t let any of them go. Put them in a different system, a system that is experienced, that knows how to handle people like this.

 

You can see why he was asked to leave the administration.  He doesn’t have any political sense, of the kind Will Rogers tracked for all those years.  And in this clip from the same show he foolishly says this when asked about his support for a Republican presidential nominee –

 

Powell: I’m going to support the best person I can find who will lead this country for the eight years beginning in January 2009.

Russert: Of any party?

Powell: The best person I can find.

 

That fish is not in the barrel.

 

The other fish are, as in this from the Gallup folks – “Although many scientists accept evolution as the best theoretical explanation for diversity in forms of life on Earth, the issue of its validity has risen again as an important issue in the current 2008 presidential campaign.”

 

Here we go again

 

See Steve Benen –

 

Gallup followed up today with some pertinent details – including the partisan breakdown.

 

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.

 

Independents and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in the theory of evolution. But even among non-Republicans there appears to be a significant minority who doubt that evolution adequately explains where humans came from.

 

So the problem isn’t just that Americans in general are confused, but that the GOP is throwing off the curve –

 

Here’s the breakdown on belief in evolutionary biology by partisan affiliations:

 

Dems — 57% believe in evolution, 40% do not

Independents — 61% believe in evolution, 37% do not

Republicans — 30% believe in evolution, 68% do not

 

Granted, the numbers for Dems and Independents aren’t great, but a strong majority of each accept modern science. That’s at least somewhat comforting.

But by more than a 2-to-1 margin, Republicans are on another page of the science textbook altogether.

 

Digby comments –

 

Hey, a quarter of the population say they believe in both evolution and creationism so it’s safe to say that there is something very bizarre about this debate. But we can also safely say that this is a GOP culture war rallying cry and not a true national obsession.

 

But it’s obvious that the candidates are nervous about this because only three of them said they didn’t believe in evolution in the South Carolina debate even though almost 70% of Republicans say they don’t. Not one of the super-pandering, smarmy flip-floppers, “Rudy McRomney,” who desperately need to establish bona fides with the fundies, were willing to raise their tiny hands along with Brownback, Tancredo and Huckabee. It seems to me that it would have been a freebie.

 

… why wouldn’t they play along when they could have sent a strong dog-whistle to the base?

 

Maybe they have their limits – or there’s a clear calculation.  You can gain the Republican base by saying science is bunk and the revealed word of God is all anyone needs, but then you face the general election.  The numbers change.  It’s a problem.

 

Jerry Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, where he works on diverse areas of evolutionary genetics, offers a critique of something odd, to fill in the detail here.  Senator Sam Brownback actually elaborated on why evolution is bunk in a New York Times article and Coyne disassembles it –

 

Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.

 

Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate.  When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air – those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo. Although I am a biologist who has found himself battling creationism frequently throughout his professional life, I was still mortified.  Because there is just as much evidence for the fact of evolution as there is for the existence of atoms, anyone raising his hand must have been grossly misinformed.

 

I don’t know whether to attribute the show of hands to the candidates’ ignorance of the mountain of evidence for evolution, or to a cynical desire to pander to a public that largely rejects evolution (more than half of Americans do).  But I do know that it means that our country is in trouble. 

 

What follows is a technical discussion of the Brownback “defense” of the biblical account of the life, the universe, and everything – of interest to science geeks – and it is nonsense.  Read it if you’d like.  He gets it all wrong, but it comes down to this –

 

Senator Brownback, along with his two dissenting colleagues, really should be forced to answer a rather more embarrassing question: who is responsible for their being so misinformed?  Where did they learn the so-called “problems” with evolution: at their mothers’ knees, or in Sunday school? Or perhaps from reading books; and, if so, what books, and who recommended them? Doesn’t a public servant have a responsibility to stay informed across a wide spectrum of topics and issues?

 

As a public service, simple answers to simple questions – “Yes.” 

But does it matter? 

As a public service, simple answers to simple questions – “Yes.”

 

Brownback’s misunderstanding of science is more dangerous than his ignorance of evolution, and should be disconcerting to educators and parents hoping to see their children educated properly.  He rejects evolution if “it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence.”  Using that criterion he’d have to reject all of science, including physics and chemistry! 

 

Science simply doesn’t deal with hypotheses about a guiding intelligence, or supernatural phenomena like miracles, because science is the search for rational explanations of natural phenomena.  We don’t reject the supernatural merely because we have an overweening philosophical commitment to materialism; we reject it because entertaining the supernatural has never helped us understand the natural world.  Alchemy, faith healing, astrology, creationism – none of these perspectives has advanced our understanding of nature by one iota.  So Brownback’s proposal to bring faith to the table of science is misguided: “As science continues to explore the details of man’s origin, faith can do its part as well.”  What part? Where are faith’s testable predictions or falsifiable hypotheses about human origins?

 

And there’s more –

 

Brownback’s ill-conceived accommodationism between science and faith extends to the notion of truth itself.  He accepts the common view that “science seeks to discover the truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths.” Nearly all scientists would object to the word “created” in this sentence, but in any case it’s doubtful whether any “truth” (in the sense of something that conforms to fact) can be gained through spirituality alone.

Scientific truths are facts agreed on by all observers using scientific methods.  The formula for water is H2O, the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.  These are matters that can be verified empirically by any scientist, be she Muslim, Catholic, or Hindu.

 

This is shooting fish in a barrel, as in this –

 

According to Brownback, we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith, but accept them if they’re compatible.  But the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago.  Are we supposed to reject this as “atheistic theology” (an oxymoron if there ever was one)?  The religious conviction that “man” is unique in ways that really matter is compelling in many ways – surely our language, art, music, and science itself are unique products of life on this planet -but holding our uniqueness to be a dogma immune to scientific analysis is an arrogant, and ultimately foolhardy, declaration of authority.

 

This attitude has enormous political – and educational – implications. What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician’s “spiritual truth”? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it’s not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone.

 

Yes, but what are you going to do?  We are clearly moving into a new Dark Ages kind of thing.  See you on the other side.

 

Maybe shooting fish in a barrel was what they did during the Dark Ages for fun, on slow days – for real.  It’s more fun to do it metaphorically.