This clip from a radio debate between Chris Coons and Christine O'Donnell this morning. She's an evolution denier and sought some argument about the separation of church and state being in the constitution. Maybe she meant to say the phrase doesn't appear in the text, though Coons did right to say it's in the first amendment and supporting Supreme Court case law.
One nice thing is that seems to still talk as much as she did on Politically Incorrect in the nineties. Hopefully it's apparent to a large majority of voters how dumb she is.
4 comments:
You could live in Delaware where this stuff is non-stop nowadays.
There is a certain scared segment of the population who really do believe the things she says. I think she even belives what she says. Hopefully that scared segment is in the minority in Dealware. Polling seems to say it is.
The sad part is that she was going for the stupid meme that the constitution doesn't explicitly say "separation of church and state" and I guess that means that we should allow more religion in government though they never seem to get that far to state it.
Rachel Maddow did good last night bringing up the clip of the idiot who said Hitler first used this phrase (and no it really was Jefferson who wrote "a wall of separation between church and State")
It's why I really liked Coon's answer. He quoted the first amendment properly and talked about case law. The Newsweek essay I posted did well about how these tea partiers are coming from fundamentalism and a reverence for a source document, but they really don't understand it.
This whole question of ignorance in our elected officials is quite interesting.
The father of the modern conservative movement in the US - William F. Buckley Jr. once famously said that he would rather be governed by the first few hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.
This was Buckley's way of saying that liberals, even very smart ones, are not well suited as political leaders, and that we shouldn't pick our leaders on the basis of intellect alone. Buckley was warning citizens not to elect those who desire to move power to the state at the expense of personal liberties. The Right has been attacking Harvard pointy headed types ever since (i.e., the wine-sipping, cheese-eating East coast and San Francisco liberal elites)
I have to admit that I agree with Buckley... sort of (about 10%).
However, what we are seeing this year, is the electoral equivalent of Buckley's thesis, come to fruition, with Tea party candidates and leaders like O'Donnell, Angle, Palin and Demint. Even Democrats like Alvin Greene (SC) are in the mix. At least Herbert Hoover was an educated man.
Of course, the political right (tea partiers specifically, and Repubs in general) being frozen in their intellectually catatonic mindset that - government is the only source of all problems, fails to realize/acknowledge/care (take your pick) that Buckley also said.....
"I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and liberals at bay. And the nation free."
Up from Liberalism (1959)
Just look at that, Buckley fears corporations right along with government. I could stomach the political right more if just one of them, at least the ones capable of independent analysis and thought, would be as intellectually honest as Buckley was.
Sadly, The current political right never takes the time to read the whole book, even from their own prophets.
Ignorance has become a badge of honor among the right, and it has also, unfortunately, seemingly become acceptable to the majority of Republicans as well (can anyone say Obama is a Muslim), and some independents as well. After all, these folks elected a very ignorant man twice to be President of the United States.
O'Donnell is not likely to win, however, not because she has almost no clue about anything, but rather, because she's a witch, and although we did just elect our first African-American president, we're just not quite ready for our first witch in the Senate.
So it goes.
TT
I mostly agree. I'll just point out, Bush was the first president with an MBA.
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