Cry havoc

If there's anything being shoved down our throats these days, it's the claim that health care reform is being shoved down our throats. It's all part of the game the minority party is playing by trying to make you think the Democrats won the White House by some sort of fluke and that the desire for health care reform wasn't what Obama's majority of voters were hoping for.

It's been a year now and the screaming hasn't let up for a moment, but a recent poll shows that half the country favors the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, whether or not you call it ObamaCare and only 43% think it's "too liberal."

It would be amusing of course if the bumper sticker bumpkins did get their "end of an error" by electing Mitt Romney who like the rest of them is giving us that old soft shoe about just how terrible the new law is because as the unimpaired remember, Mitt only a few years ago was hoping his new Massachusetts health care reform would go nationwide. It's easy to call a politician like that a whore, but it's unfair to whores and I don't want to distract from his fellow streetwalker who has been spending a fortune with TV ads warning us of the holocaust, the calamity, the apocalypse sure to wipe us from the earth if we have to have health insurance rather than hope the emergency room can cure our cancer or heart disease -- at public expense. I mean, never mind the war, conquest, famine and death -- this is health care!

Huckabee on the carpet

British comedian Ricky Gervais recently put together a short TV comedy series, Idiots Abroad; seven episodes indulging his obvious schadenfreude by making his "friend" and reputed moron Carl Pilkington miserable despite having been being sent to visit some wonderful places. It had the effect of annoying me since Pilkington, who isn't quite the idiot Gervais says he is, seems rather to be a nice and decent sort of fellow and deserved better treatment, even if that would undermine the premise of the show.

I don't feel quite the same way about Likable Mike Huckabee, affable and avuncular and sincere though he may seem. It's as hard to feel sympathy for one whose idiocy seems more purposeful and politically founded than genetic, although that may be a factor too. I'm not just talking about his shameless promotion of Bronze age ignorance and mythology and the snickering denigration of science. I'm not just talking about promoting the invasion of Libya and thus cementing the authority of Qaddafi, making us appear imperialistic and escalating the debt and putting a strain on our military capability. I'm talking abut his attempt to enlist a far more scurrilous bit of political mythology than "creation science" to promote his grotesque candidacy by telling us our president grew up in Africa and so really doesn't either understand us or have our interests at heart.

It's not just the racism. I'm used to racism. It's that the possibility of his candidacy rests on building and arming an insurgency of idiots who neither know or care about reality. It's like inviting the Klan to use your back yard for a rally and claiming you're above that sort of thing yourself.

It's not that he's black, you see -- it's just that you can't trust someone with the troubling attribute of being dark skinned. Smiling Mike surely knows that Barack Obama lived in Indonesia as a small boy but wasn't born in and didn't live in any part of Africa. He knows he was born in the USA as surely as Bruce Springsteen was and Mike Huckabee was and grew up in the American Midwest and was raised by his white relatives. So if he does know that and chooses none the less to have you believe otherwise, he's a liar willing to use lies to get elected. If he doesn't know that, he's an idiot to the degree that he shouldn't be given a more responsible or well paid position than a men's room attendant.

Huckabee shouldn't be trusted with leading a Boy Scout troop, much less the United States. He represents, despite his smiling, self-effacing sincerity, the lower skirt of the intellectual as well as the moral decency bell curve, no matter how you measure it.

Yes, professional fixer and HuckPAC Executive Director J. Hogan Gidley says Huckabee "simply misspoke" during his book tour, which is as convincing as saying the dog didn't crap on the carpet, but simply misshit. It only means he's not toilet trained, can't be trusted and we surely don't want him on the expensive rug in the oval office.

Gunboat diplomacy again?

It may seem like old news at a time when this morning's Punch and Judy show is already old by lunchtime, but I've been taking a small vacation from blogging and improving my health by not immediately looking at the news every morning. I'm back, but old news is what I have for breakfast today.

I heard Mr. Huckabee lambaste President Obama last week on MSNBC for not parking the Navy off the coast of Libya so as to intimidate Colonel Qaddafi. Do we need any more evidence for the presidential unsuitability of the avuncular mediocrity who doesn't "believe" in science but thinks it's always better to look tough even when it defeats your purpose?

The mad Colonel has made capital out of standing between Libya and the imperialism of America and what better help could we give him in putting out his message that it's either his leadership or chaos?

I have either to think that Obama bashing is sufficient end in itself for Mike to forget about any possible benefit from a move toward liberal democracy in the Middle East, or that waving the flag is all one needs to do to rally the mob, but in either case the pronouncements of Mike Huckabee are all about the candidacy of Mike Huckabee and everything he says or does is designed to further that end rather than to offer any viable solutions to real problems. Just the kind of Bozo America loves to elect, isn't he?

If this be tyranny. . .

The Republicans like to use the word Tyrant a lot. Perhaps it's the same sort of tendency you find in liars and cheats and thieves of other types who use those words to describe those who threaten to expose them. Perhaps not, but I've noticed of late that there have been a lot of calls for summary and extra-legal executions coming from Right wing writers and hate shouters like good ol' love thy neighbor Mike Huckabee or Foxboy Tucker Carlson who "personally" would like to have had Michael Vick put up against a wall and shot even though dear justice loving Tucker professes to be -- you guessed it -- a Christian. Pardon me, but I'm confused.

If you find it hard to reconcile what you think you know about Jesus and non-judgmentalism and forgiveness with summary executions for animal cruelty, perhaps you're unaware of the overriding moral imperative of the Values Party: anything we do to undermine Obama and the Democrats is patriotic and is justified through patriotism because our word is law, not your damned Constitution. Barack Obama praised the NFL's Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance and of course Barack Obama is the Tyrant Prince of Darkness so if he does anything, it's a bad thing. Vick must die, even if those animal rights people are bleeding heart liberals and even if you don't give a damn about dogs.

Last Wednesday in my local paper, I suffered through a tortuous justification of summary execution for treason of the fellow who leaked those diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the essence of which was that: had he leaked different information under different circumstances at a different time, some terrible thing might have happened. That's the basis of Mike Huckabee's equally loathsome demand for twisting the treason definition to allow the Republicans to kill their critics for the crime of informing the public that our allies aren't our allies and the government doesn't know what it's doing.

Of course if someone were lying about the failures of our government, that would be different. They'd get a regular show on Fox like Huckabee and Beck, make the big bucks and none would dare call it treason. The truth is what makes it bad, you see.

Never mind that something is exposed that would cause us to hang a foreigner the way we did an Nuremberg for, if we do it, it's not a crime. A bit like saying that if your aunt had had wheels instead of legs she'd have been a bus and so she can be sued for not picking you up at the bus stop this morning even if you don't ride the bus and she has legs anyway -- and you'd see the logic of that if you weren't a damned Libtard lover of tyranny.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, the fellow who embarrassed the military with his Afghanistan videos of course should be put up against the same wall for revealing the incompetence of Government, the lies, cover ups and perhaps the slaughter of innocents because after all, anything that doesn't cover up our misdeeds is treason unless the deeds have political importance for Republicans -- then anything is fair game and lawbreakers are heroes and patriots. Are you starting to get it? Criticizing the government is treason because it helps the enemy and there's always an enemy, don't you know -- except when the elite does it, of course, and you know who they are.

Yes, the government is corrupt, incompetent and can't do anything and so we're against it as long as that's actually false. If it's true and you prove it, you're a traitor and should be shot without due process. That's not tyranny -- a middle class tax cut is tyranny, ending insurance company abuse is tyranny, taking deadly contaminated meat off the shelves is tyranny, ending bigotry against law abiding citizens is tyranny, addressing schoolchildren on TV is Tyranny as bad as anything Pol Pot ever did. Making BP pay for their incompetence is tyranny and if you don't agree, the unelected leaders at Fox want you dead and aren't embarrassed to suggest that you be killed. Sic semper tyrannis.

Huckabullshit

Will the Huckabullshit never stop? Talking to the gutless Wolf Blitzer only moments ago, Huckabee touted the idea that a few hundred dollars tax rebate would spur consumption and boost the economy that's been weakened by more of that same idea - while recommending that we decrease consumption by adding a "fair tax" or regressive sales tax that will have the less affluent spending more of their income on taxes than the more affluent. That's bullshit. Besides the lack of evidence that tax increases lead to recession and ignoring the fact that prolonged expansion has followed tax increases, we are looking at something even worse than Bush's borrow and spend policies. We're looking at a future where the Theocrats crush the peasants and the government governs private behavior according to the dictates of the clergy.

The same smiling face responded to Blitzer's question about making the constitution conform to the will of "the living God" by rambling on about female suffrage and the flexibility of the constitution and the permanence of the Ten Commandments. More bullshit. Huckabee's living God is a dead Jew on a stick, whom the government is forbidden to acknowledge as God and the ten commandments are superseded according to Christian tradition along with the other 603 Biblical commandments the Reverend Huckster chooses to ignore as a Christian.

It's more and more evident that this man is a dangerous idiot with a confused, self contradictory concept of economics, government and theology and a complete ignorance of science.

Huckabee's Church of America

The trouble with molding a society or running a government "according to God's standards" as Mike Huckabee says we should do, is that God's standards can only be determined by people like Mike Huckabee, and Mike Huckabee, like most of mankind, has his own God. I don't think he has Krishna in mind, or Vishnu, much less the God of whom Mohammad spoke or even the God who commands us to exterminate certain nations, cast out our non-Jewish wives and refrain upon pain of death from using certain kinds of thread in out clothing or eating a cheeseburger.

Of course Huckabee is really talking about amending the constitution, not to institute the 600 some odd Biblical commandments that he and his chuckleheaded Christian cheerleaders ignore as a fundamental precept of their religion, but to solicit the support of the fundamentalist barbarians who base their "values" on the unchristian and non-Christian contempt for homosexuals and are so dependent upon polyester preachers withTeflon tongues that they think the Bible prohibits abortion.

Opening my first e-mail this morning was like entering some gas station bathroom to find the toilet un-flushed and clogged. FAITH. FAMILY. FREEDOM was the headline, followed by

Mike Huckabee a Man of Principle for President.

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”

I could hardly read the rest of it. Needless to say, I don't think a government directed by faith is anything less than a tyranny of the faithful. I don't think we need a government intruding into family matters or a government to tell us who we may or may not include in our families and if we have that, we have no freedom at all.

I'm sure I don't have to explain that the foundation of the enlightenment philosophy that produced our form of government was that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were fundamental rights and not privileges or favors bestowed upon us by God's chosen king. The latter of course was the way the world was run in the 18th century and that was supported by Biblical authority. It was a step away from the Biblical and ecclesiastical authority we took by assigning sovereignty to the people and not to the often half-witted and corrupt interpreters of "faith" like Mike Huckabee and to allow our Constitution to be twisted so as to pretend the American Revolution never occurred and the government and its Church were once again as one.

"I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards,"

said Mike speaking as though he were God's own mouthpiece. Mike Huckabee would rather have us governed by an oligarchy of Baptists and bibles with their peremptory ideas about God than by the will of the citizens. Is there anything further from the essence of democracy than Huckabee's vision?

"We need a President that thinks about all the people"

says the screed floating in my in-box, and I agree. All the people are not fundamentalists however, much less Christians of any sort. Some of us have different gods, different ideas and all of us are guaranteed the right to have them.

"Mike Huckabee is attacked by the New York Times because when asked about evolution he states "I believe that creation has a Creator."

Not so; he's attacked by those who don't want science suppressed and superstition installed.

"More than 20 years ago Mike Huckabee determined to put his faith and conviction into action fighting for the American Family and their Freedom to Pursue Happiness"

except when that happiness includes things Huckabee thinks his personal god dislikes or when that family doesn't met Huckabee's standards. Huckabee and his pet god will tell you what freedom you're allowed and indeed it will be little enough of it unless those of us who really value liberty and want a government that is us rather than them, send Mike a message of contempt by voting for a candidate that represents our traditional, constitutional values and not a church.

Best in Show

Hark, hark The dogs do bark
The beggars are coming to town

-13th century nursery rhyme-

Do we really believe Ron Paul has no idea about who wrote the articles that went out under his name during the 1990's? Does anyone buy the statement that he never read them? Does anyone think it's irrelevant because it happened before the 6 week memory span of the American public? Paul says what I want to hear about our drift away from a constitutional Republic toward an oligarchy driven by expedience. He is willing to directly address many problems directly that his opponents are either ignorant of or afraid to incriminate themselves by mentioning, but anyone can say anything. His customary candor seems to have gone missing when it comes to the Ron Paul Political Report.

Does anyone believe the pusillanimous pandering of Fred Thompson?

“On the one hand,” he said last night “you have the Reagan revolution, you have the Reagan coalition of limited government and strong national security."

Actually we never did, we had a corrupt president with a progressive neurodegenerative disease who inflated the government to record size, ignored the law, trained terrorists in Central America sold missiles to Iran and a military that tripped all over it's inadequacies while invading the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada. A pretty revolting sort of revolution it was.

"He would be a Christian leader, but he would also bring about liberal economic policies, liberal foreign policies”

Thompson said of Huckabee. The Pope would be a Christian leader too, even though neither man could be accused of being Liberal or being qualified to be our president, nor could Jesus be accused of being conservative. Perhaps that's all there is to Thompson's campaign: just say Reagan and Liberal and lie about what that means until the dogs start to bark.

“The Air Force has a saying that says if you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target” was supposed to be a demonstration of the Huckabeean wit and probably was, to anyone dumb enough to let the false syllogism pass unnoticed.

And then there was Rudy.

"There were other people on this stage that also supported the surge. The night of the president’s speech, I was on television. I supported the surge, I’ve supported it throughout.”

Me too, me too you guys - it wasn't only him, it was me too! 9/11 - 9/11 - I was there! What about a candidate that isn't afraid to criticize the grotesque and fatal errors of the worst president and most inept Commander in Chief in American history? Not amongst the Republican kennel club.

"I’m going to fight for every single job. Michigan, South Carolina, every state in this country. We’re going to fight for jobs and make sure that our future is bright.”

Says Uncle Milton Romney. Sure you are, Mitt and I'm sure you'll explain just how you're going to do it after the election is over.

Then came McCain.

“One of the reasons why I won in New Hampshire is because I went there and told them the truth, and sometimes you have to tell people things they don’t want to hear along with things that they do want to hear.”

Right, whatever suits the occasion and the audience and that's usually the latter.

Are we bothering to name a "winner" in these debates any more? For may part, I don't give a damn and I don't have a dog in this fight anyway but It's easy enough to name a loser of course. There may be about 300 million of them.

Some in rags and some in Jags
And one in a velvet gown

Fool me twice

Alcides Moreno and his brother fell 47 stories when a scaffold collapsed December 7th in New York. Alcides survived somehow and has regained consciousness. He's expected to recover and even to be able to walk again despite having broken everything.

"You're not going back to work there," says his wife and I'll bet she means it. Republicans in Iowa should be so smart. The economic news is gloomy, foreign companies are buying up all our assets, we're in massive debt to people who don't have our best interests at heart. The specters of recession and inflation are starting to seem real and our wars grind on and on and on. Corruption is rampant, funneling of public funds into private hands is standard procedure, our rights have been trampled on, but Iowa Republicans, at least a plurality of them, seem to want more of the same.

By voting for another Bible Belt Believer with the cognitive inadequacy to reject science and logic, with a preference for the authority of preachers over the law; a guy who shares their hysteria about Mexicans, their fear of "terrorists" and who seems just as much of a small town, foot shuffling mediocrity as they are, they're getting set to go back to work there.

Mike Huckabee? What about somebody who knows economics and finance.? What about somebody who knows the military from the inside, who has had lots of experience with foreign affairs, a background in science and technology? What about someone who can discuss history with the best of them -- what about someone who is the best of them?

We don't need someone to teach Sunday School to 5 year olds. We don't need someone to sit on the bench and discuss this years crops with or have a beer with or quote mistranslated Bible passages with; we don't need Mike Huckabee running or representing this country to the world. If we survive Bush, we don't need to tempt fate by getting back on that same scaffold with the same worn ropes and expect to survive again.

Huckabee comes out

Mike Huckabee is almost a gift to those of us engaged in cynical bloggery. Face it, we need a respite from the horrors of an ever crazier and more nuclear world, and nattering about the differences between most candidates has gone on so long that many of us no longer care about any perceived differences between them.

It's less so with Mike. The main result of the weight loss he seems to feel has cosmic significance is that he's now limber enough to put one or more feet in his mouth without hardly trying. Even though his stunning conflation of Benazir Bhutto's assassination and Mexican immigration left many of his supporters open-mouthed at his illogic and his pathetic attempt to put every bit of news into that Procrustean bed of illegal immigration, he keeps doing it. If that asteroid hits Mars in late January, I'm sure we'll hear about the need to build an even higher wall along the wild and scenic Rio Grande.

The Huckster's latest attempt to appeal to the unlettered aired yesterday on Meet the Press. Homosexuality, said Mike, is a choice.

"We may have certain tendencies, but [we choose] how we behave and how we carry out our behavior,"

he said to Russert. "Very interesting," Arte Johnson used to say, "but stupid." Stupid indeed, unless this is Huckabee's attempt to admit the secret homosexual tendencies so common amongst his peers. If one has to choose which gender to be interested in, one might rightly be able to say it's a choice, but most of us never had to think much about it, our natures having been formed in utero at the latest. Most people have heard the "it's a choice" argument disemboweled long enough ago to be embarrassed to hear their candidate endorse it.

I don't know how many more of his supporters will head for the gang plank after this latest revelation of idiocy, but although the press continues to wave flags for him and invent opportunities to use the name Reagan in conjunction with his, he can't have many left. Telling us that he believes we are all sinners, he doesn't seem to realize that by calling homosexuality a sin, his argument cancels itself out, but all kidding aside, Mike Huckabee is an idiot who attempts to make other idiots feel good about their idiocy so they'll vote for him.

Two plus two equals a 17 foot wall

“We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”

Said Mike Huckabee here in Florida last night. He repeated the theme today in Iowa:

“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,”

The fact that this isn't close to being true is less amazing than the sheer irrationality of his non-sequiturs.

“The fact is that the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds, it’s about someone coming with a shoulder-fired missile,”

Sure, it is, only it hasn't happened nor has it been made more likely by an assassination in Pakistan any more than the assassination of President Kennedy made it more likely for Texans to sneak into Mexico carrying rockets. The fact that the Huckster thinks Afghanistan is east of Pakistan and confuses migrant fruit pickers with Islamic extremists from Waziristan, is only a small part of the evidence that the man has no idea what he is talking about but has a strong feeling that vague mumblings in an ominous tone will allow him to latch on to the Xenophobic and Nativist gravy train. That's just what we need to represent the United States' interests in the world; a dishonest idiot who thinks Jesus wants him in power and will do the thinking for him. Come to think of it, that's what we have been saddled with for these last seven years of bad luck, and that's what we customarily vote for.

Bah, humbug

Today he shall be lifted up and tomorrow he shall not be found, because he is returned unto his dust and his thought has come to nothing

-1 Macabees 2:63-

_________________________

Mike Huckabee is a humbug. When he said

"But if you mention the name of Jesus, as I found out recently, it upsets the whole world. Forgive me, but I thought that was the point of the whole day"

yesterday, he knew damn well that mentioning the name Jesus and telling the country he hopes to be the president of that it needs a religious revival are two very different things. Like the humbug and huckster he is, he's trying to appear to be a victim of those who simply demand religious freedom. That freedom is based on the idea that neither the government nor it's officials have the right to tell you what to believe or what not to believe.

If I believe the point of the whole day is retail; if I believe that the holiday was invented to promote Deus Sol Invictus, which it was, or was the birthday of Mithras, which it was, or a pagan Norse festival, which it was; if I believe that Jesus was born on an unspecified day in April as Christian sources aver, it's my guaranteed right as an American citizen to do that and it's my guaranteed right not to be badgered for my beliefs by the government.

If Huckabee thinks that Yahweh has juggled the laws of the universe or at least the polls to assure that he succeeds; if Huckabee thinks that God's arms are so short he can't reach the ground without the help of Huckabee, then I hope that some divine force exists to grind his arrogance into the dust. Of course I will be satisfied if he simply loses because my fellow Americans are fed up with candidates who hide behind mythology and think they have the power to tell us whether our beliefs are good or not.

President Jesus

"but these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind. . ."

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson-

If there really is some kind of anthropomorphic God who watches what we do, then perhaps all we really are here for is to be the cosmic equivalent of some crappy, low budget network sitcom designed to entertain the tired old deity, sitting on some beer stained couch in his underwear after a long day on the loading dock, eating cheese doodles and slapping his hairy thighs as the buffoon, Mike Huckabee, tells us that the problem with the United States is that we aren't religious enough.

"the winds of spiritual change in a nation that has forgotten its God;"

Is what he calls the wholly invented increase in violent crime that such charlatans have always invoked. That's the ticket. That's why there are criminals, that's why young people sometimes snap; they're not groveling and speaking in babble and contributing to people like Huckabee. Our very practice of freedom is a sin.

Obviously God, an unemployable, inarticulate sociopath himself, has been expressing his displeasure with our "sin" by prompting, a la Charles Manson, young people to go on murder sprees because he's forgotten how to inspire prophets or write on walls and he lost the remote some time ago.

Anyway, the nitwit ramblings of Huckabee fit into an age old pattern of blaming any damned thing you please on "sin" and lack of contributions to preachers - anything of course but the sins of preachers themselves. Plague, drought, rain, wind, crop failures or toads falling from the sky - it's all because we dare to take direction from sources other than that oldest and most nefarious of professions - the preacher.

Government, says Mr. Reagan lite, doesn't have the answers, unless of course Mike is elected and replaces our birthright of religious freedom with a Jesus Christ based version of Christian Sharia and then of course the peaceable kingdom will be free of all crime, illness, bad weather or unpredictable geological events. History certainly teaches us that such is always the case, or at least it does to the mindless morons and ignorant idiots that support this embarrassingly incompetent humbug.

This nation was designed to be the first in the world whose government had no religious connection. It was a bold experiment designed to let individual thought develop unfettered. In this light, Mike Huckabee stands revealed as a traitor to the cause of freedom, a willful deluder of men; deceiver, illusionist, liar. That he has a chance of election in any nation were people wear clothes and don't eat each other very often is a disgrace and the only winds of change he represents is the breeze you feel when you've been tricked into walking off a cliff. Are we going to actually vote for a man who insists he's here to replace the legitimate government of the United States with Jesus Christ according to Huckabee? Are we actually not going to prosecute someone who opposes the sovereignty of the American people; who hints that people should be forced to tithe to churches? Is there no tar, are there no feathers, no rails?

A loaf, a fish, a crock

There are millions of people out there praying that a little will turn into much, says the would-be preacher president Mike Huckabee. He's right. Very little would have to turn into much more than this shameless huckster could possibly have to offer by himself; for him to be even remotely what the world needs to put in the White House. It may be an effective way to latch on to the dreams of the witless, some of whom are convinced that invisible spirits have a secret plan of Glory for them too, but when half the candidates claim that god wants them as their co-pilots, it gets hard to deal with all the loaf and fish metaphorical bullshit. How long will it be before we see a shirtless Mike with bleeding stigmata or Mitt with his head in a white hat reading the secret golden tablets?

I've been off-line with a nasty virus for nearly a week and the relief of finally feeling better was instantly tempered by the disgust generated by images of Preacher Mike and Prophet Mitt in full revival mode this morning. Which one is more God smitten and thus better suited to understand complex geopolitical, economic, strategic and scientific problems? Doesn't matter. America's problems will be solved by raving and swooning and not by intelligence, knowledge and experience. Just keep sticking our head deeper into the crock and we'll all feel much smarter by and by.

Last week I had lunch with a couple of the country's premier geneticists. We discussed the recent progress in understanding neurodegenerative disease at the molecular level. Not long ago I read that an unspeakably huge hole in the visible universe may confirm the existence of parallel universes. Mankind might seem to some as emerging at long last into the full light and glory of truth. Somewhere in America, blue-suited idiots rave about the Bible like paleolithic shamans dancing around their fires in some cro-magnon night.

Pascal, O'Reilly, Huckabee

When Mike Huckabee, the nitwit Biblical literalist with presidential pretensions, told Bill O'Reilly last Wednesday that he believed that God made Eve from Adam's Rib and that there was no reason to disbelieve it (quite a whopper in it's own right) he probably wasn't aware of Pascal's Wager.

"But I just believe he did it. And so, you know, if it turns out that I am wrong, I have lost nothing. If it turns out I’m right, it is a good thing."

The famous proposition by the mathematician Blaise Pascal is a well used toy of logicians although it's hard to pin down just what kind of fallacy it is, it being such a farrago of flimsy sophistry. Even so, it's well enough known as such to cause one with even a basic education to avoid the embarrassment of using it, as the Huckster did, in front of someone with an elementary knowledge of philosophy or logic. What then of this bumpkin airing his ignorance before an enormous audience he's trying to convince of his presidential level wisdom and insight?

Pascal famously argued for his own belief in the Christian God by saying if the belief turned out to be false, there was no afterlife in which he would suffer and if true, he had heaven to gain and therefore belief was the safer bet. Of course the argument is built on selected assumptions about this God; That's he is the one Christians believe in, that he punishes disbelief or rewards it over good works or other virtues. The argument fails to address the infinite assumptions one could make about this god and the arbitrary selection it makes amongst Gods who because there is no evidence, can be said to hate mankind in general as safely as one can say he punishes disbelief.

To someone who sees no reason to question what he's told although the evidence is absent, Pascal's wager may seem like an argument, but although I could dissect it in detail and dismiss it in a hundred ways, I will simply say that this sort of argument is as easily tossed aside as any of the traditional "proofs" long since banished to the swamps of madness and superstition.

Suffice it to say, that a man who sees no reason to credit the massive and irrefutable disproof of Adam's muddy origins and Eve's being cloned from the rib of a male while becoming a female without becoming Adam's identical twin is a dangerous idiot and I see no reason to allow him anywhere near an office of public trust.

Right on Ron!

One of the reasons I hate watching the TV political debates is that I can't stand up and say what nobody ever stands up and says while listening to the slogans and platitudes about victory and honor and perhaps it's just as well I'm not there to be arrested for it, but at least we have Ron Paul. He and I may disagree about many things like public education and social security, but all along in this premature political contest, when he speaks up about our history in Iran, when he calls hucksters like Huckabee on his claims that continuing the Iraq horror story is about "honor" I'm on my feet saying "Right on Ron."

It's not about honor, it's about saving face and the insistence that saving face is more important than doing the right thing is the same thing that made Nixon prolong the war in Viet Nam. Huckabees memorized babble about "unity" reminded me more of gangsters needing to stick to the story to avoid prosecution than about us all getting behind a lie and a war and the liars who started it. It's not unity it's saving face.

Crooks and Liars has the video here.