Dowd, Damon, and teh Dumbness.

September 13th, 2008 RWA Posted in News | 2 Comments »

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.