Month: September 2008

Luke O’Brien looks at the computer game Spore’s Intelligent Design implications:

…the science in the game is wafer thin. Despite some overenthusiastic prognostications in reviews—"Spore could be the greatest gaming tool ever created to disseminate Darwinistic ideas," says one critic—the game makes no room for random mutation, the real source of differentiation. And natural selection plays only a minor role. If you don’t bless your beast with a mouth or hands, you won’t fare well. Almost anything else goes. At one point, my creature’s legs and arms were connected by useless and mechanically impossible minilimbs. I did just fine. In Darwin’s world, I would have been a snack for a more efficient predator.

Reading the "press" in this surreal climate right now, one is tempted to despair. I’m not giving in to it, because I still believe that the actual truth matters in the world. If propaganda could win in the end against truth, then Bush’s approval ratings would be somewhere in the high 80s. They are in the lower 30s. In the end, the American people are not fools. And facts are facts. Right now, we are being subjected to an absolutely disorienting blizzard of lies and absurdities (Palin is a lying absurdity) from the McCain campaign. The idea is to so disorient people, to throw so many new concepts, brands, lies, images, marketing and distortions at them that they will not be able to focus on the issues in this election, and the real choices serious people have to make. But facts are stubborn things, as someone once said.

In the end, the fact of no WMDs in Iraq is indisputable.

The fact that Bush appointed a know-nothing apparatchik to deal with hurricanes is unavoidable. The fact that Bush made no serious preparations for occupying Iraq is clear as day. The fact that he and his party have added $32 trillion to the debt of the next generation is now part of the global financial system. The fact that the Bush administration effectively withdrew the United States from the Geneva Conventions and have legitimized the torture of prisoners across the world is empirically indisputable. The fact that Bush has failed to stem Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities is inescapable. The fact that under George W. Bush, the country suffered its biggest attack in history, and the mass-murder of 3,000 people by religious fanatics, and that he was warned about this and did nothing is simply history. The fact that in his presidency, the West missed a critical window of opportunity to develop new forms of energy and to wean ourselves off foreign oil is staring us in the face. And the fact that after seven years, this president who once declared that he would get him dead or alive still has not apprehended the man who planned the 9/11 attacks is equally beyond dispute. And the fact that under George W. Bush – far from finding and killing these monsters, we gave them a new sanctuary and did virtually nothing to stem or control the possible supply of WMDS to al Qaeda is equally indisputable. It is equally indisputable that only one individual has been successfully prosecuted in the war on terror and he will be out of jail soon enough, because the evidence that could have convicted him could not be introduced into a court of law.

In the end, whatever the power of the religious fundamentalist movement that is now the GOP in simply denying reality, reality wins. And the fact that John McCain is now a serial and shameless liar will also sink in. The question before us is not whether this will be one day understood to be true. The question is whether it will be flushed out in time.

We cannot control these despicable liars in the McCain campaign. We can only tell the truth as fearlessly and as relentlessly and as continuously as we can until November 4. We must do our duty. And if the American people want to re-elect the machine that has helped destroy this country’s national security, global reputation and economic health, then that is their choice. But I am not so depressed to think that they will.

We must give them the truth. And that will feel like hell. And we must tell it like Truman told it: cheerfully, passionately and relentlessly.

There are so many chilling details in the NYT’s account of Palin’s paranoid, vindictive, corrupt abuse of gubernatorial and mayoral power, I don’t quite know where to begin. But I wonder how the right-wing  blogosphere feels about a small-town tyrant who keeps an enemies list and seeks to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares question her:

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

Now I begin to understand the intimidation I have been subjected to for simply asking questions. All I can reassure my readers is: I’m now more determined than ever to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about this dangerous, vindictive Christianist cipher being foisted on the United States.

McCain may not care if his lies get more and more disgusting. But some are noticing. Here’s the St Petersburg Times’ editorial today:

McCain’s straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak. It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity, and it is a short-term strategy that eventually will backfire with the very types of independent-thinking voters that were so attracted to him.

You can look through my entire archives and columns. I always respected McCain, even when I disagreed with him. I made him my close second pick to Ron Paul in the primaries. I backed him in 2000. I have chatted and spent time with him and always admired him. No more. His actions and words in the last month have been despicable.

Enjoy:

Indeed, as Hillary put it to the media: GROW A PAIR.

From the Gibson interview:

GIBSON: But I, color me a cynic, but I hear a little bit of change in your policy there. When you say, yes, now you’re beginning to say it is man-made. It sounds to me like you’re adapting your position to Sen. McCain’s.

PALIN: I think you are a cynic because show me where I have ever said that there’s absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any affect, or no affect, on climate change.

Here is what she said a year ago:

"I’m not a doom and gloom environmentalist like Al Gore blaming the changes in our climate on human activity."

Charlie Gibson is not a cynic. Sarah Palin is a liar.

I have to say I find David Frum’s lonely intellectual honesty on the right at the moment to be very refreshing. He airs a very sensible email from a reader here. Money quote:

McCain’s campaign is chock-full of phony contradictions; how is he supposed to bring "safe change" since this year he has essentially promised to reverse all the  anti-Bush policies that made him a "maverick" in the first place? He has just squandered the single best reason for voting for him by choosing an almost totally inexperienced "celebrity" as his running mate.

Foreign policy excepted, can you tell me what McCain’s governing philosophy is? He has changed positions on numerous occasions times during the past ten years, going from being one of the most centrist GOP senators to one of the most conservative ones. Or is it all merely a Romney-esque cynical ploy to fool conservatives to vote for him, since he will anyway have to work with Reid/Pelosi to get anything done…

Who is more trustworthy: the young unapologetic liberal who promises real change or the old guy who is running against reality?

It’s actually quite rare to see a politician reveal themselves as solely, solely about the pursuit of power as McCain has this past month. Bill Clinton was more honorable and honest.

Another revealing exchange:

GIBSON: Why do you both keep saying that Obama is going to raise people’s taxes? It’s been pretty clear what he intends. He’s talked about middle-class tax cuts, extending Bush tax cuts on everything but people who own or earn more than $250,000 a year — cuts taxes on over 91 percent of the country. Why do you keep saying he’s going to raise people’s taxes?

PALIN: Well, I would argue with the whole premise of that, that his mission is to not increase taxes. He’s had 94 opportunities to either vote for a tax cut or not support tax increases. And 94 times, he’s been on the other side of what I believe the majority of Americans want.

Not a lie, for which one should at this point be grateful, but a total avoidance of the question. And the question refers to her and McCain’s lies that Obama is promising to raise taxes on the middle class. He isn’t. No one can look at his proposals and say he is. So when asked to retract a lie, Palin refused and offered a talking point. She really is McCain’s soul-mate, isn’t she?

Andrew Bacevich outlines the Petraeus Doctrine:

Simply put, an officer corps that a decade ago took its intellectual cues from General Colin Powell now increasingly identifies itself with the views of General Petraeus. In the 1990s, the Powell Doctrine, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, assumed that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent. According to the emerging Petraeus Doctrine, the Army (like it or not) is entering an era in which armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous—with the application of force becoming a lesser part of the soldier’s repertoire.

Peter Suderman examines another empty, cynical ad.