Die Meme, Die!

September 29th, 2008 RWA

       Some never do, do they? The latest of these is the seemingly unstoppable “Sarah Palin is a YEC” assertion, which we debunked a couple of weeks ago. But now, it’s back, and both the LA Times  (in a story which Mark Hemingway accurately describes as being a “heaping pile of factual carnage” ) and the reprehensible Huffington Post, the favorite blog of the latte liberal set, have finally decided to casually report the latest “eyewitness” allegation of Palin’s supposed YEC beliefs as unvarnished fact, after it has been bouncing around in the moonbat blogosphere the past few weeks.  This supposed eyewitness is one Philip Munger, who claims that in 1997, after Palin gave a commencement speech to some homeschooled students (wow, a perfect storm of liberal boogeymen! How convenient!), she casually told him, after he asked her about her religious beliefs, that she believed dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and that Jesus would return to Earth in her lifetime. And who, exactly, is Philip Munger? Does he have a background in reporting or science any other qualifications which might make his claim credible? Not exactly. A musician by profession, he’s also a raving far-left moonbat blogger whose most notable prior claim to fame was a cantata canonizing Rachel Corrie. 

            But beyond the question of whether or not we can trust Munger to be an unbiased (*snort*) source of info on his former mayor and governor, has there been any further corroborating evidence that might confirm these claims of his? None so far, but they satisfy the left’s need for the “truthiness” which they like to project onto their opponents. They don’t need any actual evidence, corroboration or fact checks when it satisfies their gut feelings about what Palin, and by implication, anyone who dares vote for her, is all about. Even if Munger’s claims are fake, they’re still accurate! We want our biases confirmed and our prejudices pandered to! And if you press them some more, they’ll fall back on Ken Ham’s catchphrase: were you there ? No, I wasn’t there in Wasilla back in 1997, but I do know that Munger is not an unbiased and credible source, and in either science or politics, the verification of a source as credible is crucial in evaluating any sort of claim. Until Palin makes a genuine, wholehearted YEC statement which I can see and hear with my own eyes and ears, Munger is nothing more to me than another sludge driller.

(h/t to both lgf and the Curmudgeon)

Posted in News | 2 Comments »

From the Stacks: This Week’s Odd Science News

September 26th, 2008 Central Archivist

This week China prepared to put three “taikonauts” into orbit to perform a spacewalk.  Evidently, the Chinese were so confident in the success of the mission they issued a press release that included dialog from the mission… before the launch actually took place.  One might be tempted to make a quip about Chinese quality control, if it weren’t for the tragic scandal involving milk and milk products (including baby formula) unfolding in that country at the moment.

The New Zealanders who worried it was The End Of The World As We Know It got a temporary reprieve when CERN’s Large Hadron Collider suffered a helium leak this week, shutting down its operation until next Spring.  Evidently, a quarter of the Kiwis surveyed were worried the LHC would create a planet-devouring micro black hole.  No worries, mates.  If a micro black hole was created (extremely unlikely), it would evaporate almost immediately.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Commentary, News | 1 Comment »

Dowd, Damon, and teh Dumbness.

September 13th, 2008 RWA

Needless to say, us Rational Republicans were pretty disappointed when Sarah Palin offered an ambiguous answer to question of allowing creationism in public schools, saying that she wouldn’t enforce its teaching in schools (and the evidence tends to confirm this her actual position), but was not necessarily against discussion of it in the school curriculum.  Not only did this feed into the hungry Palin smear machine in the forms of distortions of her actual position (including some made by people who should know better) but has aided in the spreading of particularly vicious lies pandering to the prejudices of far-left political bigots. The most recent one: Palin is not just a creationist, but a Young Earth Creationist, who believes that the Earth is less than four thousand years old and that people and dinosaurs walked the Earth. Now, there are enough faux conservatives out there who actually believe that crap, but Palin certainly isn’t one of them. But this is starting to catch like wildfire through the blogosphere, as one might expect.  Among the perpetrators are Howard Zinn’s foster child Matt Damon and frustrated Catherine Zeta-Jones wannabe Maureen Dowd.  The source of this rumour, as both Ace and Patterico have pointed out, is an obviously fake viral e-mail, that has been debunked on CNN, no less. Oops.

While you can make obvious connections between this and the scurrilous “Barack is a Muslim” lies, but in their own way, they’re even worse. Even if Obama were a Muslim, so what?  The only people who fell for that lie were disgusting bigots who hold prejudices against Muslims to begin with, no different than the people who went into anti-Mormon hysterics over Mitt Romney’s presidential run. On the other hand, while simply being a Mormon or a Muslim or an evagelical Christian is not itself relevant to whether or not someone is responsible enough to govern, professing beliefs in something like young earth creationism is not just irrational but anti-rational, and by spreading this rumour, the far left clearly hopes to get more moderates and undecideds on their side. Although the CNN report above claims that the “Palin is a YEC” rumours will mainly play with already-decided liberal Democrats, the reality is, a lot of people who are not necessarily liberal Democrats will take these rumours very seriously. If Republicans want to avoid being the target of these sorts of lies in the future, they should quit trying to weasel themselves out of these questions in order to appeal to the Coulter-Falwell types who they erroneously assume to be their base. In addition to lending themselves to lies, they result in grave doubts from people who on the surface, should be their allies. In other words: Draft Jon Huntsman in 2012.

Posted in News | 2 Comments »