In a high-spirited and free-wheeling interview with a handful of Texas print reporters yesterday, President Bush:
· Expressed "complete confidence" in top aide Karl Rove -- while stubbornly refusing to say anything more about what he knows about the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's identity.
· Said he still believes his friend, Baltimore Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro, has never used steroids -- in spite of the player's suspension Monday for violating baseball's anti-drug policy.
· Endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to include the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution in public school science classes.
Get all that? Rove, despite his ever-shifting "dog ate my homework" excuses, is just a good man (doing hard work, no doubt) getting rolled by tricksy journos (and it's a well-known fact that when a man is 100% innocent, you just can't say anything); Palmeiro is just an innocent man getting rolled by MLB, which apparently has a vested interest in losing money by suspending and embarrassing the people that put money into its coffers; and Jeebus deserves equal time in science class, even though by definition, He doesn't even want it. After all, either you believe or you don't.
Clearly, Bush does. He believes whatever anyone tells him, apparently. Read the whole transcript from Froomkin's article. It's a real window into the hamster wheel that passes for this guy's brain.
Now, is Bush really that freakin' stupid? I doubt it, if only because someone that truly stupid would be unable even to exercise the low rigors of regurgitating 3x5 cards at potemkin town-halls, which is all Bush does anymore when he talks to reg'lar Merkins. So that means that much of this is ass-covering and pitching to the mouth-breather base.
After all, how would it look if it turned out that Palmeiro had been using 'roids since he was a Texas Ranger, and George W. Bush was his boss? And it's not as if Bush was afraid to get his hands dirty with the baseball team -- he suckered the citizens of Arlington into buying him a nice new stadium, and he eminent-domained hisself a parkin' lot for the nice new stadium. To just instantly assume that he'd never tolerate one of his power hitters popping an occasional shot of stanozolol -- well, okay. Good luck with that blind assumption there.
One might also assume he was a misunderstood genius. Such are the inherent pitfalls of slavish hero-worship.
More on the creationism/evolution "debate" here.
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Mr Bush said in comments to five Texas newspapers on Monday. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Although Mr Bush did not explicitly endorse the concept of Intelligent Design, which contends that certain features of biological systems are best explained by an "intelligent" cause rather than by natural selection, such influential groups as the National Academy of Sciences strongly oppose the teaching of ID in schools.
Mr Bush's comments threaten to place him outside the mainstream of scientific opinion and align him more closely with social conservatives and with "creationists" who challenge Darwinism on religious grounds.
"Mr Bush would have done better to heed his White House science adviser, John Marburger, who said that evolution was the 'cornerstone of modern biology' and who has characterised ID as not even being a scientific theory," said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a group that defends the teaching of evolution. Mr Marburger expres-sed those views in an online discussion with the Chronicle of Higher Education in March, Mr Branch said.
"The federal government has very little influence over curriculums and instruction. The most Mr Bush could accomplish is stirring up the feeling that he supports the creationists' position," said Mr Branch. Yet mainstream Republican opinion has begun to show differences on matters of religion and science. Last week Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, distanced himself from Mr Bush's restrictive position on stem cell research, putting forward a bill that would enable the expansion of research using embryonic stem cells. "It isn't just a matter of faith, it's a matter of science," Mr Frist said.
Efforts to promote ID have been on the rise with the help of such groups as the Discovery Institute in Seattle. In a broadcast yesterday Dr James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, an influential conservative group, also predicted: "We are now on the verge of major changes in how the origins of life and evolution are taught in science class rooms across the nation."
In Kansas, the board of education is concluding hearings on whether creationism can be taught in schools. Georgia's Cobb County school system has placed labels on textbooks saying "Evolution is a theory, not a fact", and New York lawmakers attempted but lost a recent effort to enact a law requiring state schools to teach both ID and evolutionary theory.
John West, a director at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, recently accused "the new Darwinian fundamentalists of becoming just as intolerant as the religious fundamentalists they despise".
Yeah well, when you have facts and science on your side, you have the right to be "intolerant". He's right, and I for one will never apologize for it. I am intolerant of the notion that creation myths should be presented as science, just as I am intolerant of racism, or homophobia, of institutionalized corruption and thievery, of cruelty to children and animals -- of things that sensible people know objectively to be flat out wrong.
Put simply, there are just some subjects that do not require having both sides endlessly aired. After a while, it becomes obvious to even the slow kid in class that the airing of the contentious subject is the very point of it all. It's just a handy way to whip up political sentiment, and the accompanying monetary motivation. America's manufacturing base may have declined precipitously, but we never seem to run out of contrived conflict product.
I would sincerely encourage every would-be creationist out there to come up with a lesson plan for a comparative religion course, take it to their respective school boards, and prevail upon them to make such a course a required part of the curriculum. I see no problem whatsoever with that; children of any (or even no) religious background can learn a lot of constructive things about human history, and how intrinsically religion has entwined itself (and generally abused its role) with governmental power. That's one thing I can agree with Bush on -- part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.
Of course, that's not what he really means -- what he really means is that he and his base of megachurch window-lickers want all children pummeled with explicitly Christian views, and they want taxpayers to pay for it.
If Bush or his minions just once had the fortitude to say what they really meant, the debates would end pretty damned quickly.
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