"Barak Obama does poorly with working white people", says Chris Matthews. This phrase has annoyed me for decades, and it's time to call it out. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature of American politics, "working people" means "blue collar workers", people who, very generally, work primarily with their bodies and not with their minds.
This was one of the many semantic battles that Republicans let Democrats win in the 70's and 80's, and it is as dishonest as it is anachronistic. We live in a society completely dependent on those who work with concepts instead of objects. The computer era has made it so that the person who can handle concepts can be 10,000 times as productive as the person who can't. The implication of this phrase, that those who don't wash their hands at the end of the day aren't "working people" is insulting to them, and does nothing but inflame tensions between the haves and the have-nots in society. It implies that people with white collars merely "push paper" while others do the "real work". This is nonsense. And having done both, I can testify that working with your mind is a lot harder than working on an assembly line.
It is time people who use this "working people" phrase are called on the absurd, inflammatory assumptions within. Anyone who puts in an honest days effort at productive activity for a paycheck is a "working person", and deserves respect for that, whatever color their collar.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Experiments in the lab don't count, unless you create life
Every time a scientist creates something in the lab that supports evolution, creationists consistently call foul, claiming the mere involvement of intelligent people voids the results, since they were the result of an intelligence. Yet then they turn around and claim that they'll believe us if we create a life form from scratch in the lab. Nina May's comment is typical:
"So where did it begin, and if it was as simple as a big bang, then recreate it. If man really did evolve from an ameba [sic]. . . a simple one celled creature, then certainly he should be able to make a man from one today. With all the science, the technology, the internet, and the huge crowd of followers desperate to prove there is no God and that man, in his total stupidity, really thinks he can become one, then prove it."
Never mind the idiocy of the argument that man should be able to recreate anything nature can do. Can you say "hurricane"? Earthquake? Please.
But really, would you guys please get together and tell us which it is? Half of you are telling us that any lab experiment is tainted with intelligence, the other half are demanding we get into the lab and prove our point. Which is it?
"So where did it begin, and if it was as simple as a big bang, then recreate it. If man really did evolve from an ameba [sic]. . . a simple one celled creature, then certainly he should be able to make a man from one today. With all the science, the technology, the internet, and the huge crowd of followers desperate to prove there is no God and that man, in his total stupidity, really thinks he can become one, then prove it."
Never mind the idiocy of the argument that man should be able to recreate anything nature can do. Can you say "hurricane"? Earthquake? Please.
But really, would you guys please get together and tell us which it is? Half of you are telling us that any lab experiment is tainted with intelligence, the other half are demanding we get into the lab and prove our point. Which is it?
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Why Conservative Christians Piss Us Off More than Liberal Christians
Michael Medved, in one of his comical persecuted-Christians articles, asks:
"Why is it less controversial when liberals talk about their religious outlook than it is for conservatives to speak about our faith?"
Simple Mike. Because when liberals talk about their religion, it's usually because they were asked, and it would be tough to tell what their religion was from their voting record. They respect the separation of church and state. I might disagree with their analysis of the data, but at least they care about the data. Conservatives on the other hand, give us shit like this:
"Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins, health groups told Congress on Wednesday.
The Bush administration, however, voiced continuing support for such programs during a hearing before a House of Representatives panel even as many Democrats called for cutting off federal money for so-called abstinence-only instruction.
These programs, backed by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception methods to teenagers in schools, have received about $1.3 billion in federal funds since the late 1990s."
We are pouring money down a rat hole because conservative Christians refuse to deal with the reality of what does and does not work in sex education. They believe that sex outside of marriage is a sin, plain and simple. Any appeal to data is just a smoke screen. For evidence, simply ask someone like that to commit to supporting whatever the data supports. Ask them if they would support handing condoms out in elementary school if the data shows it reduces pregnancies and disease transmission. Watch them squirm, dance, bob and weave to avoid answering.
So Mr. Medved, THAT'S why conservatives make us a lot more nervous than liberals when they talk about their faith. Liberals mostly keep their goofy little comfy ideas to themselves. You actually try to apply them in the real world, which gives us abstinence only education, evolution-free biology, and makes me wait in the damned store until noon before I can get my Sunday beer. Is this really so difficult to grasp? Their religion makes them seem pitiable. Yours makes you a giant pain in the ass, and produces lots of social problems, not the least of which is more ignorant children having unwanted children.
"Why is it less controversial when liberals talk about their religious outlook than it is for conservatives to speak about our faith?"
Simple Mike. Because when liberals talk about their religion, it's usually because they were asked, and it would be tough to tell what their religion was from their voting record. They respect the separation of church and state. I might disagree with their analysis of the data, but at least they care about the data. Conservatives on the other hand, give us shit like this:
"Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins, health groups told Congress on Wednesday.
The Bush administration, however, voiced continuing support for such programs during a hearing before a House of Representatives panel even as many Democrats called for cutting off federal money for so-called abstinence-only instruction.
These programs, backed by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception methods to teenagers in schools, have received about $1.3 billion in federal funds since the late 1990s."
We are pouring money down a rat hole because conservative Christians refuse to deal with the reality of what does and does not work in sex education. They believe that sex outside of marriage is a sin, plain and simple. Any appeal to data is just a smoke screen. For evidence, simply ask someone like that to commit to supporting whatever the data supports. Ask them if they would support handing condoms out in elementary school if the data shows it reduces pregnancies and disease transmission. Watch them squirm, dance, bob and weave to avoid answering.
So Mr. Medved, THAT'S why conservatives make us a lot more nervous than liberals when they talk about their faith. Liberals mostly keep their goofy little comfy ideas to themselves. You actually try to apply them in the real world, which gives us abstinence only education, evolution-free biology, and makes me wait in the damned store until noon before I can get my Sunday beer. Is this really so difficult to grasp? Their religion makes them seem pitiable. Yours makes you a giant pain in the ass, and produces lots of social problems, not the least of which is more ignorant children having unwanted children.
Lost Kitty: For Those Who Think Science is so Irrelevant
For those who think science is just for nerds, I give you the lost kitty. I hope they found him.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
More Bad News for Expelled: Yoko Sues over use of Imagine
As reported by Reuters Yoko Ono is suing Premise Media and others involved in the making of Expelled for their illegal use of John Lennon's "Imagine":
"Yoko Ono, son, Sean Ono Lennon, and Julian Lennon, John Lennon's son from his first marriage, along with privately held publisher EMI Blackwood Music Inc filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeking to bar the filmmakers and their distributors from continuing to use 'Imagine' in the movie.
They are also seeking unspecified damages."
Let's hope this is only the first of many. Justice never tasted so sweet.
"Yoko Ono, son, Sean Ono Lennon, and Julian Lennon, John Lennon's son from his first marriage, along with privately held publisher EMI Blackwood Music Inc filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeking to bar the filmmakers and their distributors from continuing to use 'Imagine' in the movie.
They are also seeking unspecified damages."
Let's hope this is only the first of many. Justice never tasted so sweet.
Ben Stein's Dishonest Film Exposes Dinesh D'Souza's Naivete and Ignorance
Beware the Creationist Ellipses. Those with experience dealing with creationists, and their tendency to quote mine, know this is rule #1. "Any time you see a creationist quote...that looks...like this", you can guarantee that whatever was eliminated by the ellipses contradicts whatever point they are making. The same applies to video. If a creationist interviews a scientist about evolution, you can be guaranteed that the answer you see the scientist give will be edited in a way that makes the scientist appear to be making an argument that he isn't making.
Dinesh D'Souza is either unaware of this, or simply doesn't care because the edited version told him what he wanted to hear. In any case, the only person exposed by D'Souza's latest article is D'Souza, not Richard Dawkins, the quote-filmed scientist.
But before we get to that, let's remind everyone how dishonest D'Souza is by corrected all the false statements he makes...in his opening paragraph:
"In Ben Stein's new film 'Expelled,' there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything."
Nonsense, and this is remarkable even for D'Souza. One of the things that irritates creationists to no end is that scientists tell them, willingly and loudly, that evolution does not explain everything, and that it is silly to expect it to. It doesn't explain what morality we should have, it doesn't explain how the universe began, and most relevant to this article, it doesn't explain how the very first replicator came to be. Scientific theories are very implication specific, and all scientists, Dawkins included, will lecture you on this point as long as you allow them to. For D'Souza to pretend to be unaware of this stretches credulity beyond the breaking point.
"This is part of Dawkins' grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design."
Ah, so to D'Souza, "refuting design arguments" = "everything". Glad we got that cleared up. And yes, insofar as ID proponents have made testable, scientific claims, evolution has refuted them. Irreducible complexity's claims have been falsified (functioning subsystems and indirect pathways exist), and their probability arguments are flawed (necessary mutations are not independent events), as are their statistical assumptions (it is not proper to assume all unknown distributions are linear). However, ID itself has not, and can never be, refuted, because it lacks scientific content. This is a distinction many ID proponents completely ignore.
"The argument from design hold [sic] that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument.
ID says nothing about the universe. The apologetic argument that does is known as "The Fine Tuning Argument". The ID argument is that certain attributes of living things (eg consciousness, flagellums, and eyes) are most likely the product of an intelligent designer, and this is the argument evolution keeps disproving.
So Stein puts to Dawkins a simple question, "How did life begin?" One would think that this is a question that could be easily answered. Dawkins, however, frankly admits that he has no idea. One might expect Dawkins to invoke evolution as the all-purpose explanation. Evolution, however, only explains transitions from one life form to another. Evolution has no explanation for how life got started in the first place. Darwin was very clear about this.
And some people don't understand why he's called "Distort DeNewsa" in some circles. Five easily referenced assertions to begin this piece, and not one accurate. Coincidence? The IDers he defends would disagree.
D'Souza then bores us with some of those very same errors: overstating the significance of "complexity" (a term evolution critics are always very careful to never objectively define), miscalculating probabilities, and then hitting us with another self-serving bizarre redefinition of a common English word:
"Moreover, the earth has been around for some 4.5 billion years and the first traces of life have already been found at some 3.5 billion years ago...What this means is that, within the scope of evolutionary time, life appeared on earth very quickly after the earth itself was formed."
So "1 billion years" = "very quickly within the scope of evolutionary time" to D'Souza? That would make the entirety of human history, around 200,000 years, a mere blink of an eye to Dinesh. Remind me to not wait on him when he says he'll be back in a minute. But seriously, 1 billion years is nearly 1/4 of the earth's history. It is not "very quickly", even in evolutionary terms.
"Is it reasonable to posit that a chance combination of atoms and molecules, under those conditions, somehow generated a living thing?
Of course it is. D'Souza is simply not thinking this through (shocker, I know). Simply compare the two competing theories here, and their predictions, to the data:
1) Atoms and molecules, within the constraints of chemical and physical laws, organized themselves into a very simple replicator.
2) An intelligence of unknown origin created the earth, and then purposely placed replicating life on it.
Now, given our two theories, how long would we expect it to take for that first replicator to appear? With #1, we'd expect it to take a very long time. Obviously it couldn't happen quickly or we'd see creation events happening all around us, even in our peanut butter. But you can do a lot with a billion of just about anything. A billion seconds is over 31 years).
However, with theory #2, we'd expect it to happen rather quickly. After all, if the earth was created for the purpose of having life on it, there is no reason the designer would wait for a billion years to put it there. This is why IDers avoid making predictions like the plague. They always turn up on the short end of the evidence.
The more important part of this issue is the inherent contradiction in the creationist position. They decry that the complexity of life we see is beyond the ability of mindless processes, but their solution is to posit a being of even more complexity as being the cause. To them the high complexity of life had to have a cause, but the even higher complexity of the designer doesn't. Thus, even if we found that life was in fact put here by some designer, say an advanced alien race, that would still leave us the problem of explaining their complexity. It is an infinite regress out of which the creationists cannot climb, and it dooms their argument.
This was the point Dawkins made when he was pressed by the Expelled interviewers as to what the possibilities of a designer were, and he suggested that it could be aliens. This theory is called "panspermia", and while there is a fringe group who believes it, Dawkins is not among them, and never has been. Yet that is exactly what Stein and company want you to believe, so they edited the film accordingly, leaving the context of the statements out so that it appeared that Dawkins was a panspermian.
D'Souza fell for it, and as a result, he reaches the correct conclusion, but for the wrong reasons, and as a result, doesn't grasp the full implications.
"But doesn't it take as much, or more, faith to believe in extraterrestrial biology majors depositing life on earth than it does to believe in a transcendent creator?"
Essentially, yes, an unreasonable amount of faith, which ignores the problem of the infinite regress of complex causes. This is precisely why Dawkins doesn't buy it, which he would gladly explain to you himself given an opportunity. But D'Souza would rather believe Ben Stein on what Dawkins' says than Dawkins himself. No wonder his articles are always so riddled with easly avoidable errors.
Dinesh D'Souza is either unaware of this, or simply doesn't care because the edited version told him what he wanted to hear. In any case, the only person exposed by D'Souza's latest article is D'Souza, not Richard Dawkins, the quote-filmed scientist.
But before we get to that, let's remind everyone how dishonest D'Souza is by corrected all the false statements he makes...in his opening paragraph:
"In Ben Stein's new film 'Expelled,' there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything."
Nonsense, and this is remarkable even for D'Souza. One of the things that irritates creationists to no end is that scientists tell them, willingly and loudly, that evolution does not explain everything, and that it is silly to expect it to. It doesn't explain what morality we should have, it doesn't explain how the universe began, and most relevant to this article, it doesn't explain how the very first replicator came to be. Scientific theories are very implication specific, and all scientists, Dawkins included, will lecture you on this point as long as you allow them to. For D'Souza to pretend to be unaware of this stretches credulity beyond the breaking point.
"This is part of Dawkins' grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design."
Ah, so to D'Souza, "refuting design arguments" = "everything". Glad we got that cleared up. And yes, insofar as ID proponents have made testable, scientific claims, evolution has refuted them. Irreducible complexity's claims have been falsified (functioning subsystems and indirect pathways exist), and their probability arguments are flawed (necessary mutations are not independent events), as are their statistical assumptions (it is not proper to assume all unknown distributions are linear). However, ID itself has not, and can never be, refuted, because it lacks scientific content. This is a distinction many ID proponents completely ignore.
"The argument from design hold [sic] that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument.
ID says nothing about the universe. The apologetic argument that does is known as "The Fine Tuning Argument". The ID argument is that certain attributes of living things (eg consciousness, flagellums, and eyes) are most likely the product of an intelligent designer, and this is the argument evolution keeps disproving.
So Stein puts to Dawkins a simple question, "How did life begin?" One would think that this is a question that could be easily answered. Dawkins, however, frankly admits that he has no idea. One might expect Dawkins to invoke evolution as the all-purpose explanation. Evolution, however, only explains transitions from one life form to another. Evolution has no explanation for how life got started in the first place. Darwin was very clear about this.
And some people don't understand why he's called "Distort DeNewsa" in some circles. Five easily referenced assertions to begin this piece, and not one accurate. Coincidence? The IDers he defends would disagree.
D'Souza then bores us with some of those very same errors: overstating the significance of "complexity" (a term evolution critics are always very careful to never objectively define), miscalculating probabilities, and then hitting us with another self-serving bizarre redefinition of a common English word:
"Moreover, the earth has been around for some 4.5 billion years and the first traces of life have already been found at some 3.5 billion years ago...What this means is that, within the scope of evolutionary time, life appeared on earth very quickly after the earth itself was formed."
So "1 billion years" = "very quickly within the scope of evolutionary time" to D'Souza? That would make the entirety of human history, around 200,000 years, a mere blink of an eye to Dinesh. Remind me to not wait on him when he says he'll be back in a minute. But seriously, 1 billion years is nearly 1/4 of the earth's history. It is not "very quickly", even in evolutionary terms.
"Is it reasonable to posit that a chance combination of atoms and molecules, under those conditions, somehow generated a living thing?
Of course it is. D'Souza is simply not thinking this through (shocker, I know). Simply compare the two competing theories here, and their predictions, to the data:
1) Atoms and molecules, within the constraints of chemical and physical laws, organized themselves into a very simple replicator.
2) An intelligence of unknown origin created the earth, and then purposely placed replicating life on it.
Now, given our two theories, how long would we expect it to take for that first replicator to appear? With #1, we'd expect it to take a very long time. Obviously it couldn't happen quickly or we'd see creation events happening all around us, even in our peanut butter. But you can do a lot with a billion of just about anything. A billion seconds is over 31 years).
However, with theory #2, we'd expect it to happen rather quickly. After all, if the earth was created for the purpose of having life on it, there is no reason the designer would wait for a billion years to put it there. This is why IDers avoid making predictions like the plague. They always turn up on the short end of the evidence.
The more important part of this issue is the inherent contradiction in the creationist position. They decry that the complexity of life we see is beyond the ability of mindless processes, but their solution is to posit a being of even more complexity as being the cause. To them the high complexity of life had to have a cause, but the even higher complexity of the designer doesn't. Thus, even if we found that life was in fact put here by some designer, say an advanced alien race, that would still leave us the problem of explaining their complexity. It is an infinite regress out of which the creationists cannot climb, and it dooms their argument.
This was the point Dawkins made when he was pressed by the Expelled interviewers as to what the possibilities of a designer were, and he suggested that it could be aliens. This theory is called "panspermia", and while there is a fringe group who believes it, Dawkins is not among them, and never has been. Yet that is exactly what Stein and company want you to believe, so they edited the film accordingly, leaving the context of the statements out so that it appeared that Dawkins was a panspermian.
D'Souza fell for it, and as a result, he reaches the correct conclusion, but for the wrong reasons, and as a result, doesn't grasp the full implications.
"But doesn't it take as much, or more, faith to believe in extraterrestrial biology majors depositing life on earth than it does to believe in a transcendent creator?"
Essentially, yes, an unreasonable amount of faith, which ignores the problem of the infinite regress of complex causes. This is precisely why Dawkins doesn't buy it, which he would gladly explain to you himself given an opportunity. But D'Souza would rather believe Ben Stein on what Dawkins' says than Dawkins himself. No wonder his articles are always so riddled with easly avoidable errors.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
What The Obama Bitter Flap Tells us About Our Politics
I have been watching the flap over Barak Obama's gaffe in describing some people as bitter and clinging to guns, religion, and anti-immigration in the face of tough economic times. And it surely was a gaffe, as sure as it would have been for him to say "We've got the black vote wrapped up, so we really don't have to worry too much about it. I mean what are they going to do, vote Republican?" There are truths one simply does not speak, and he should have known better.
But the amazing thing about it to me is that in the many, many comments I've seen, be they in the oral, written, or blogged press, no one seems willing to accept this reality. Sure, slap Obama around for his mistake, but the mistake was in the uttering of it, not the belief. Obama is not an elitist for daring to suggest that underpaid, overworked, high school dropout country bumpkins might be a bit pissed off about their lot in life, and lacking the necessary cognitive skills to reason out why, pray to their gods while they shoot at targets with Mexicans painted on them.
If recognizing that makes one an elitist, so be it. Obama should watch his language, but I don't have to, so let's get this out in the open right now. Ever spend much time in the country? I have. You ever see those movie and TV plots where the city guy goes into the country and finds that the people there are a lot more intelligent than he thought they were? They just had a different kind of intelligence, kind of folksy and down to earth? Well, it's a load of crap.
Oh sure, country folks have their virtues. A lot of them work harder than I've ever worked, and they've got your back like no one else. The bullshit factor is pretty low, and a helluva lot of them are willing to go die for the rest of us, and for that and that alone they deserve respect. I'd rather spend time with a cowhand any day than a slicked-back frat rat who thinks he's superior to me because I earned my wealth while he inherited his.
But intellect? Sorry, there's a reason the smart country kids end up migrating to the city when they don't inherit the family business. There's little for them in the sticks, where the biggest building in town is the church, and society stops on Friday nights in the fall to watch a little controlled teen violence on the gridiron. They think prayer counts as action and don't think they came from no monkeys. They know America is the greatest country in the world, except for all those damned foreigners coming here who don't even speak American good. Of course, they've never been anywhere, but rest assured, they know all about the rest of the world, or so they bullshit themselves.
Let's not bullshit each other. A big reason this country is going down the crapper is because our politics revolve around pleasing this immense population of hayseeds whose bullets are bigger than their brains and who get their morality from 2,000 year old sheepherders. And yes, they blame foreigners for their problems. One thing that really amazed me in my country travels was the obsession with the three F's: foreign aid, faggots and farts. And now that their immigrant ancestors have established themselves here, to hell with anyone else's immigrant parents wanting to do the same.
But do we recognize this? Nah. Instead, we have a media which labels any politician with brains an elitist, and accuses anyone who thinks in complete thoughts rather than short soundbites of waffling or being esoteric. Why? Because long complicated answers are too much for the double-digit IQ crowd, and they dislike politicians who communicate that way. Their ministers tell them that they can understand all things because The Great Designer says so, and they believe the minister, and reject all ideas they cannot immediately grasp as "book smarts" that conflict with common sense. And the media caters to this POV because idiot TV viewers like shows that validate their idiot thoughts. Thus we get The View, Bill O'Reilly, and Answers in Genesis.
That, my fellow Americans, is how you get a president like the one we have, and candidates like most of them have been. It is said that America gets the politicians it deserves. I believe it more every day. If we punish politicians for daring to utter unpleasant truths, in too damned many big words, and keep only the guys that say things short and stupid (like "freedom requires religion"), then we will again, be getting the politicians we deserve.
But the amazing thing about it to me is that in the many, many comments I've seen, be they in the oral, written, or blogged press, no one seems willing to accept this reality. Sure, slap Obama around for his mistake, but the mistake was in the uttering of it, not the belief. Obama is not an elitist for daring to suggest that underpaid, overworked, high school dropout country bumpkins might be a bit pissed off about their lot in life, and lacking the necessary cognitive skills to reason out why, pray to their gods while they shoot at targets with Mexicans painted on them.
If recognizing that makes one an elitist, so be it. Obama should watch his language, but I don't have to, so let's get this out in the open right now. Ever spend much time in the country? I have. You ever see those movie and TV plots where the city guy goes into the country and finds that the people there are a lot more intelligent than he thought they were? They just had a different kind of intelligence, kind of folksy and down to earth? Well, it's a load of crap.
Oh sure, country folks have their virtues. A lot of them work harder than I've ever worked, and they've got your back like no one else. The bullshit factor is pretty low, and a helluva lot of them are willing to go die for the rest of us, and for that and that alone they deserve respect. I'd rather spend time with a cowhand any day than a slicked-back frat rat who thinks he's superior to me because I earned my wealth while he inherited his.
But intellect? Sorry, there's a reason the smart country kids end up migrating to the city when they don't inherit the family business. There's little for them in the sticks, where the biggest building in town is the church, and society stops on Friday nights in the fall to watch a little controlled teen violence on the gridiron. They think prayer counts as action and don't think they came from no monkeys. They know America is the greatest country in the world, except for all those damned foreigners coming here who don't even speak American good. Of course, they've never been anywhere, but rest assured, they know all about the rest of the world, or so they bullshit themselves.
Let's not bullshit each other. A big reason this country is going down the crapper is because our politics revolve around pleasing this immense population of hayseeds whose bullets are bigger than their brains and who get their morality from 2,000 year old sheepherders. And yes, they blame foreigners for their problems. One thing that really amazed me in my country travels was the obsession with the three F's: foreign aid, faggots and farts. And now that their immigrant ancestors have established themselves here, to hell with anyone else's immigrant parents wanting to do the same.
But do we recognize this? Nah. Instead, we have a media which labels any politician with brains an elitist, and accuses anyone who thinks in complete thoughts rather than short soundbites of waffling or being esoteric. Why? Because long complicated answers are too much for the double-digit IQ crowd, and they dislike politicians who communicate that way. Their ministers tell them that they can understand all things because The Great Designer says so, and they believe the minister, and reject all ideas they cannot immediately grasp as "book smarts" that conflict with common sense. And the media caters to this POV because idiot TV viewers like shows that validate their idiot thoughts. Thus we get The View, Bill O'Reilly, and Answers in Genesis.
That, my fellow Americans, is how you get a president like the one we have, and candidates like most of them have been. It is said that America gets the politicians it deserves. I believe it more every day. If we punish politicians for daring to utter unpleasant truths, in too damned many big words, and keep only the guys that say things short and stupid (like "freedom requires religion"), then we will again, be getting the politicians we deserve.
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