Bill Frist, intellectual embarrassment, needs a wake-up call
Sent August 20, 2005

 
Bill Frist, Senate majority leader, deserves a smack upside the head with a college biology text.

Either he never took a course in evolutionary biology, wasn’t paying attention when it was taught, or has forgotten anything he ever knew about it. Whichever of these three is the reason, any one of them renders him an embarrassment — to the scientifically literate and to the electorate. Mind you, physicians aren’t automatically scientists, although they’d like to think they are; but the ones who don’t do real research (and Frist, a surgeon, is among them) aren’t steeped in scientific method. Perhaps that underlies his latest lapse in judgment: he now touts the ridiculous notion that so-called “intelligent design” should be taught in schools alongside the rather well-documented theory of evolution, as if they were somehow equivalent in scientific value. They are not.

Far from it: evolution has years upon accumulated years of evidence behind it, evidence that has been tested, peer reviewed, and published. The research that has produced that evidence can be readily duplicated, and has been time and again. Intelligent design, on the other hand, is a seemingly reasonable sounding cover for creationism, which is not a scientific theory in any sense of that phrase but a mere assertion, a religious claim — and like so many religious assertions, it and its proponents suffer from the conceit that they don’t actually have to produce any evidence for their assertion in order for it to be taken seriously. Real chutzpah, that.

‘Going Postal’ with a twist, part 2
Sent on July 26, 2005

 
We know their names now: Mohammed Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussain, Shahzad Tanweer, and the mysterious Jamaican, Germaine Lindsay. They were the London bombers of 7/7. We don’t know their individual motivations for suicide-bombing, nor who recruited them for it.

The information that has trickled in about them to date hasn’t brought much clarity so far. Their families are bewildered; the two young wives never suspected. People who knew the three from Leeds say they were nice boys, and were liked. No one realized they’d become Islamic extremists, let alone that they had it in them to kill innocent civilians.

‘Going Postal’ for Islam
Sent on July 11, 2005

 
Here’s a theory for you: the London bombers were merely about to 'go postal' — until some opportunistic terror strategist enlisted them to do what they were going to do anyway (die) but gave them a seemingly better reason (reward in Paradise) and a convenient rationalization for their own failures (it’s not your fault: those lousy infidels hate you and discriminate against you). Hardly far-fetched at all, these days.

We're told in a variety of reportage that at least three of the London Bombers had been banned from all three of their local neighborhood mosques, for reasons nobody seems to want to share; that at least two were college dropouts, having failed as students; that one seemed to lose himself after the close of his local cricket pitch (field) where he'd been an enthusiastic sportsman until then (sports, ostensibly, had kept him out of trouble before, but his sport of choice was apparently no longer available locally; also, his father is in bad health and can’t hold down a regular job); and that at least one of the others may have had some lingering, stinging life disappointment recently. Two were unemployed or underemployed, and a third had traded university for working in his father’s fish and chips shop.

Sudden hard-line “conversions” to radical Islam notwithstanding, by bombing London these four were responding less like traditional terrorists and more like garden-variety American or European or Canadian hostage-takers and murder-suicides, who turn the rage of failed hopes, lost jobs, etc., on their own families, coworkers or neighbors. Think of Michael Douglas’s character in the film Falling Down. These are people who have lost all hope but who also, upon closer examination, have developed absolutely no coping skills to deal with whatever sudden, major misfortune life has handed them (we can argue another time about how much rationalization is involved and whose job it is to develop such coping skills in the first place). They are stunted personalities, perhaps. Occasionally, they become snipers. Here, we just call them lone gunmen and nuts – probably because they haven't become pipe-bombers yet. But if our murder-suicide nutcases had suddenly become suicide bombers in big public areas instead of simply despondent wackos who take it out on the closest available people (i.e., the ones they know best), we'd be calling them terrorists, too — and perhaps missing the point because of it.

In Defense of (Real) Blondes: An Open Letter to Men’s Health and Men Everywhere
Sent August 23, 2004

 
I occasionally pick up Men’s Health and one or two other men’s magazines (GQ, Esquire) just to check out what they’re telling men about women — and to see whether or not I think what they’re saying is true (as I’m still dating, forewarned is forearmed). Imagine my severe annoyance when I discovered that Men’s Health is still parroting — and reinforcing — the same old anti-blonde stereotypes (“Head-to-Head: Blonde vs. Brunette,” September 2004 issue). Nothing but blonde jokes could be more offensive, and being a lifelong blonde (yes, I have baby and grade-school pictures to prove it) I’m particularly pissed that they used so-called experts to justify their prejudices, without ever citing or questioning the actual sources (how do we know they’re experts? Who sez??). Whatever happened to proper attribution? I felt like giving the entire editorial management and most of the quoted sources a thump in the head.

As a journalist and policy analyst, I’m frequently in the position of being a debunker of popular myth. Clearly, I have to do it again if I ever want American men to take blondes (and me) seriously. Here in Chicago, we journalists have a saying: If your mother says she loves you, check it out – and Men’s Health should have been much more conscientious about checking out and questioning its sources. Let’s get specific.

Grounded in Unreality
Sent July 15, 2004

 
Alan Keyes is living proof of the fact that a supposedly intelligent man with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school can still have a grating personality and be pretty stupid when it comes to dealing with people. There’s nothing politically smart, for example, about gratuitously insulting the daughter of your own party’s vice-presidential candidate. George W. Bush, on the other hand, is proof that someone who botched his education at an Ivy League school that he never could have enrolled in on his own merits can still be pretty clever about conning the public by being a seemingly nice, decisive guy about it.

That’s the big difference between Keyes and Bush the Lesser, and what makes the latter more politically effective than the former. What they have in common, though, is scarier: they’re bold, decisive, and speak from strong conviction — about all the wrong things, for all the wrong reasons, and they’re both devastatingly divorced from reality. These guys are so out of it, they wouldn’t recognize a reality check if it punched them in the nose — all the more reason they need one (the reality check, or the punch in the nose? Take your pick).

Here’s the question all voters should force themselves to answer before they enter a voting booth: what good is decisiveness and conviction if you’re decisive about (and convinced of) all the wrong things? What good is it if a man acts boldly but stupidly, because virtually everything he believes and acts upon has been repeatedly shown to be untrue? That’s exactly what Bush the Lesser has been doing for four years — while the polls continue to reward him for it.

Reagan’s gone, but the lies live on — if we let them
Sent June 11, 2004

It’s time to speak ill of the dead. Ronald Reagan is gone, but the Big Lies live on. The nation and the media may have a knee-jerk desire to say nice things about the recently departed, but preserving historical accuracy allows incivility. In this case, history begs for it, so I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him.

Whether it’s ingrained good manners, guilt at the prospect of upsetting the grieving widow, or just chickening out of speaking truth when the deceased’s supporters are plentiful and loud, there’s been a wave of willful self-delusion and myopia about Reagan that’s affected most of the news media and the political world since his death. There are times when frankness is necessary, however, and this is one.

That the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers so softballed their obituaries and editorials raises eyebrows, but that's not as shocking as the fact that some of those obits, editorials, and columns repeat the Big Lies that this same press rightfully challenged when they were first spun. It’s as if the news media have developed collective amnesia about Reagan — at the exact moment that Republican spinmeisters are doing their damndest to make sure we swallow those Big Lies, so that history will be biased accordingly and so that we are more favorably disposed to the sad case in the White House who is currently up for reelection. We’ve even forgotten that political hacks and flak-catchers earned the sobriquet ‘spinmeisters’ during the Reagan Administration, because that’s when they perfected the practice of ‘spinning’ bad news into an art. It means they got good at lying, which seems to be a required trait in the Beltway.

re: Maureen Dowd – DeLay, Deny and Demagogue; or
Politicans and the awful case of the living-dead Terri Schiavo
New York Times, Thursday, March 23, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/opinion/24dowd.html

From my colleague Bob Roberts, sent to me March 24, 2005:

This is what makes me so angry. I know we disagree on the basic issue; I think Michael Schiavo is a liar, and I don't believe he knew, has proof or can prove that Terri wanted to die and personally believe he should be charged with murder if she does. (I'm really suspicious of anyone who has a wife in this state AND another long-term relationship [elsewhere] with kids [involved]. I'm sorry. The vows said "for better or for worse." Perhaps it's my personal experience that drives that, but I find it difficult to believe he's been "there for her" when he goes home to someone else each night.) But I know we agree on one thing ... that the actions of the more-sanctimonious-than-thou group who claim to be in Terri's corner really drive us nuts. For me, it's not so much what they've done but why they're doing it.

I believe, as Dowd does, that none of them care a whit about Terri Schiavo at all and I REALLY object to them loading all of their baggage onto her back. Their overall agenda creeps me out, and this is just more confirmation. I have a right in this country to believe as I see fit and should not have one group's version of The Truth, or whatever you want to call it, shoved down my throat. It's what many of our ancestors came here to avoid, even if most of them weren't particularly tolerant of others' religions.

If the public reaction to the federal attempt at intervention is to build a groundswell against DeLay and Co., I say great, even if I disagree with the majority on this issue. DeLay is evil. Flat out. Something has to stop him.