Isebrand.com

"Darwinism" is about political power. Evolution is not.

Dr. Kate correctly pointed out recently on the Thoughts From Kansas blog:

Creationists insist on calling [evolution] "Darwinism." If they can get enough people to think that science is a religion, then they can argue that their religion ought to get as much time in the science classroom as "our" religion does.

Joshua Rosenau highlights Olivia Judson's argument that "Darwinism" is a "useless phrase," and that "no sensible person ought to call evolutionary biology Darwinism (and...no sensible person does)." Descent with modification, the closely related or single ancestry of all species, and natural selection were genius discoveries about evolution, by Charles Darwin (photo), yes. But they were not from the whole story. Much more--such as the role of genetics--would be and still is being discovered about evolution. Darwin was the first, best, greatest contributor to our understanding of evolution...but not the sum total of our understanding of evolution, and relative to numerous details of evolution that Darwin described, he's even been proven wrong.

So why do Creationists so doggedly insist on the "Darwinism" term to describe evolution? The real answer: political power.

Those who reject evolution as scientific fact often have political agendas relating to religion-based social conservatism. They aim to obtain power over the lives of others by attempting to make the Theory of Evolution sound like merely a cult--a Charles Darwin cult; spiteful, anti-religious adherence to some opinions Mr. Darwin penned in the 1800's. They often fear certain implications of evolution, many of them imagined--such as "social Darwinism," which is bunk and rejected by scientists far and wide--but not all of them imagined: for example, evolution's truth reveals the vacuousness of literalistic interpretations of creation myths such as those in the Book of Genesis. They fear how particular ideas of their religion-based worldview--for example, that homosexuality is a sinful choice, that political equality for women is a dangerous idea--may be complicated or even discredited by science's truths.

Of course, irrationally fearing the implications of evolution is a bit like irrationally fearing the implications of gravity. Fearing either one to the point that you'd basically deny the thing's reality is stupid; but, understanding them is empowering. Flight itself, though it might seem the opposite of gravity, is not possible without understanding gravity. Fear gravity, and you'll never invent the airplane. Similarly, fear evolution, and you'll never come to understand fundamental realities about life in the universe; you'll cure far, far fewer diseases; you'll languish in a comparatively retarded sense of wonderful constrained to an intellectual arena delineated by theology instead of an ever-expanding sense of wonder based on new discoveries about life--based on the scientific method of observation and verification.

McCain adviser Deal Hudson out of step with American Catholics

Frank Cocozelli has more on Deal Hudson, John McCain adviser.

What does McCain's use of Catholic Right icon Deal Hudson as a campaign advisor and surrogate tell us about the presumptive GOP nominee's view of American Catholics?  Simple: just like President George W. Bush, his Catholic constituency is not the rank and file faithful, but a small reactionary faction in the hierarchy here and in the Vatican.
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If Senator McCain is now listening to Deal Hudson and seeking out support among the Catholic Right -- will he modify or reverse his position supporting federal funding and oversight of embryonic stem cell research, a promising avenue of science supported by the majority of American Catholics? Will he also embrace Hudson's bizarre views on global warming which echo those of crackpot radio host Rush Limbaugh?  McCain already embraces a Radical Right economic vision that cuts deeply against the interests of millions of working and middle-class Catholics in struggling communities in, for example, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

GOP-led purge of voters. How you can help expose it.

The situation:

In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations.  Guess their color. In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives – overwhelming Black voters. In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor. In swing states Ohio and Nevada, new federal law is knocking out tens of thousands of voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.

What you can do to help:

Greg Palast has teamed up with Robert F. Kennedy to investigate several cases on voter purges taking place right now all over the United States but most notably in the West/Southwest area. He's asking all of us to donate whatever we can to get his documentary about this produced and on the air.

Religious right in Iowa GOP flex their muscles. (And the 1000th post on Isebrand.com)

Hat-tip to science education champion Ed Brayton (Dispatches from the Culture Wars), who highlights the tension between Republican Senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley (photo), and the religious right within his party. This is clear evidence of the continuing ascendancy of the religious right in Iowa. The story's source is none other than the rightwing Moonie-owned organ, The Washington Times,

Evangelical Christians in Iowa, dominant in the state's Republican Party, have denied Sen. Charles E. Grassley his request for a place on the state's delegation to this summer's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
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"The Republican Party of Iowa is moving significantly to the right on social issues," the just-ousted Iowa Republican National Committee member Steve Roberts told The Washington Times. "It hurts John McCain's chances to win this state."

As Ed summarized: "They're upset because Grassley is investigating financial shenanigans by a number of TV evangelists, all of whom preach the 'prosperity gospel' - recognized as a fraud and a scam even by most Christians."

"Religious" in the term "religious right" basically just means that the religious right will biblically proof-text their way into a justification to religiously practice petty and Machiavellian politics. No charity there. Grassley showed integrity and initiative, and the religious right in Iowa's GOP smacked him around for it. Nice!

(An unrelated editorial aside: This is the 1,000th post on Isebrand.com! Congratulations to me on sustaining so long this weird project in poor time management!)

Salon.com uncovers more post-9/11 abuse of power by Bush White House

Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.

Is conservatism's politics of polarization over?

George Packer's article in The New Yorker, "The Fall of Conservatism," in reviewing Rick Perlstein’s new history Nixonland, offers insights into the directions that political conservatism may next go.

Packer sees modern American conservatism as rooted in divisiveness, in the effort to peel away layer by layer the New Deal coalition of voters that had endured through the early 1960's. He writes that Nixon's administration adopted a strategy of "working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few."

As an example, he cites first-hand evidence from Pat Buchanan:

Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote.

The goal was nothing less than a great conservative movement that would take its place as the most recent in a string of grand political movements in US history, "Jacksonian Democracy, Republican industrialism, and New Deal liberalism."

Interestingly, George W. Bush while running for President in 2000, suggested this kind of politics of polarization was past. Instead, his administration wallowed in it.

Within hours of the Supreme Court decision that ended the disputed Florida recount [in George W. Bush's favor,] Dick Cheney met with a group of moderate Republican senators, including Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island. According to Chafee’s new book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President,... the Vice-President-elect gave the new order of battle: “We would seek confrontation on every front.... The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us....” Its conduct of the war on terror broke with sixty years of relatively bipartisan and multilateralist foreign policy.

Packer's summary of conservatism's trajectory is that it is a movement that

Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.
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Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Packer interviews several prominent political conservatives who clearly see evidence that the majority of American voters are sick of such politics of division as the Republican Party has practiced for decades. Given President Bush's low approval rating and Democratic Party successes in the 2006 midterm elections and recent special elections, they might be correct.

But that doesn't mean conservatism is doomed. It needs to acknowledge "wage stagnation, inequality, health care, [and] global warming" as central issues and not simply cede them to the Democrats. There are signs that more thoughtful conservative politicians and commentators are doing just that.

What is more, there are weaknesses in the new Democratic coalition that Senator Barack Obama symbolizes. According to Packer, a principle weakness is Democrats' inability to recognize that for many Americans "the economic condition of the country as inextricable from its moral condition." Packer suggests Obama address the question of perceived liberal elitism "as frontally as he spoke about race," to do as FDR did when he--as an East Coast patrician--drew Midwestern farmers and Appalachian miners to himself: don't pander; instead, admit that he is not like white swing voters are, but then explain how that doesn't matter.

(Photo: Barry Goldwater accepting the Republican Party's nomination for President in 1964.)

Obama!

Sen. Barack Obama tonight:

"It's not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush 95 percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year. It's not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs. ... And it's not change when he promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave young men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians."

From the Associated Press:

In a symbolic move, Obama spoke in the same hall where McCain will accept the Republican nomination at his party's convention in September. Campaign officials, citing the local fire marshal, put the crowd at 17,000 inside the eXcel Energy Center, plus another 15,000 outside.

Obama for a more perfect union. Obama for a patriotism that begins with caring about one another. Obama for protection and empowerment of the middle class. Obama for a new respect for voters as more than simply "liberals" and "conservatives," "blue" and "red." Obama for turning the page on the failed policies of the past 8 years.

(Photos: Sen. Obama (and wife Michelle) in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 3, the evening of the Montana and South Dakota primaries when Obama claimed the Democratic nomination for President.)

Things thought in Maine

As a pig to truffles, so I am to the nibbly bits of wisdom from Bill in Portland Maine. Some recent highlights....

On Scott McClellan: "That's the trouble with being two-faced.  It doubles your chance of biting yourself in the ass."

Take note:

Percent of Senate votes by John McCain in 2008 that have supported President Bush's views: 100% (95% in 2007)
(Source: Think Progress)

Oh no!

Oh Mac, say it ain't so!  A McCain campaign bigwig---part of the D.C. lobbyist bloc the "maverick" swears he hates---resigned for unconscionable skullduggery.  And then another resigned.  And another.  And another.  And then yesterday...another.  Which, if my math is correct, leaves McCain with exactly one person left on his senior campaign staff: his mom.

Things Bill knows:

John McCain is who George W. Bush would look like today if he gave a damn about the magnitude of his failures.

It's of grave concern when a Democratic candidate is tagged as an elitist for having an Ivy League education, but when someone points out that many Republican candidates are themselves ivy-league graduates with large houses, summer cottages, fancy cars and closets full of designer dresses and crisp tuxedos, it barely warrants a shrug.

Democratic candidates have to reveal their spouses' tax records going back many years. Republican candidates don't.

Democrats have a conservative wing. Republicans don’t have anything even remotely resembling a liberal wing.

(Image: Called the great seal of the state of Maine. Yet it shows a moose. Above the moose sits the Soviet star and the state motto, "Dirigo," which is Latin for, "There he goes." The seal also depicts Death as a middle-aged man and Buster Brown with serious bling.)

Hagee's arrogant heterodoxy: you're not a Christian if you disagree with me

From PFAW's Rightwing Watch:

Televangelist John Hagee, in a recently aired sermon, outlined what he meant by the term “counterfeit Christians”: those who take public policy positions he disagrees with, on issues from abortion and gay marriage to welfare.

Watch the video here.

John McCain, who courted Hagee’s endorsement, now can’t seem to decide what to do with the pastor. Perhaps McCain will continue to denounce him on TV while bragging about their close relations in front of the ffolks Hagee describes—those who are “truly saved” by the GOP platform.

Gore Vidal interview on DemocracyNow

Amy Goodman recently interviewed Gore Vidal in his L.A. home. The topic: George W. Bush's presidency. More on Vidal here.