Ohh ooohh goody! Lets get smacking!
Agree or not, Christopher Hitchens is extremely serious, and so is his point. I disagreed with him about the war, but I never questioned his sincerity and found some of his arguments stirring, though in the end, romantically naïve. In this case, I think his reasoning is sound and so are his conclusions.
The Republican party made a deal with the devil in the last 40 years, and Sarah Palin is that deal's apotheosis. She is the goddess of ignorance, incuriosity, and bigoted exceptionalism that handed the Republicans from William F Buckley to George Bush. But she isn’t the cause. I don’t blame her. She is just another of the gifts from this fetid period in American politics along with collapsing bridges, flooded streets, overfilled prisons, incomprehensible debts, boiling oceans, blood soaked deserts, peeping toms in our inboxes and know-nothing religious fanatics on our school boards and bedrooms. This is the legacy of this president and the whole failed, bankrupt period of corporate maximalism he has happily killed. Governor Palin’s presence on the national stage –however galling- is just a trifle compared to that legacy of destruction.
But it is also in that context that Palin’s remarks must be heard. Is it defensible to say that she was critiquing our admittedly lousy and corrupt earmark system? Yes, but not plausible. It can only be read as it was intended: another attack on science, rigor, results competence and curiosity from the millennial wing of the republican party. Read Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science for examples of ideology trumping sound science. Read Rajiv Chadresekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone for examples of how purity became more important than ability in the botched occupation of Iraq. Or Thomas Ricks’ book Fiasco. Or The Dark Side by Jane Mayer. Or just look at your 401(k) and then at the salaries of the heads of our non-existent banking sector to see how theological purity triumphed over merit these last years.
As for examples of how she has imposed her religious views on others, I can’t say exactly, because maybe her religious views are shared by many of her constituents and very few felt imposed upon. Beside the point. The point is that religious doctrine made into policy is un-American and dangerous. The example I will give of that is Intelligent Design. When running for governor she said:
Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.
This is… breathtakingly disingenuous. I don’t need to go into the charlatanism of ID here. Read Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, by philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross. They exhaustively demonstrate it is religion, all the way down. ID has no place in our biology classes, period. You want to teach your kid the evangelical line? Religious liberty gives you the opportunity to do so, as you please. There are many places around the world, where the state has an official religion, where religious minorities don’t have that freedom. That isn’t her beef. Governor Palin and her ilk are pissed because they’re the religious majority, and they can’t force it on others. Its not enough to teach their own kids; they have to teach everyone else’s kids too.
Peggy Noonan wrote, “The Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country.”
I say Noonan has some brass putting it that way, but what the hell, better late than never. Now if only the republican party could pull itself out of our bedrooms, stop purging voting rolls, quit torturing people, close the American gulags, stop trying to replace science with theology, let whoever wants to vote vote and actually engaged the problems of the day, they might win back the country’s trust
And about Reverend Wright on AIDS. I wrote about that
here:
But in brief:
• There is absolutely no credible evidence that the United States government or anyone else couled have engineered the HIV virus.
BUT
• Wright did not say the US invented HIV at the National Press Club this year. He said “Any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.”
• Wright was referring to US sales of biological weapons to Saddam Hussein that were confirmed in February 1994, when then-Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan held hearings on Gulf War syndrome
• There are many people who deny that HIV causes AIDS, the most famous being UC Berkeley Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Peter H. Duesberg, who isolated the first cancer gene. He is an expert in retroviruses and on that basis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. His letters and commentaries challenging the theory that HIV causes AIDS have been published in the Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS and the New England Journal of Medicine.
• The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, left 400 black men with syphilis untreated and deceived. For 40 years. Federally employed doctors told the men they were getting an experimental drug. This was a lie. There was no drug.
• Many of the men’s wives and children were infected.
• The program was stopped not 100 years ago, but in 1972.
So which is crazier? To question whether a government that countenanced the needless suffering of death of its most vulnerable citizens “to see what happened” might have been involved in a repeat performance a couple of years later? or suggesting that evolution is a farce foisted on us by atheists?
The sooner this time, and by extension Sarah Palin’s , passes, the better all of our lives will be.
