"Idiot America"

In case you need more than a cracker to feed your outrage, about which I have gone on too long already, PZ has gathered up links to "a little collection of past articles that will serve to infuriate and enlighten."

Following the very first one led me to "Greetings from Idiot America," by Charles P. Pierce. Which is awesome. It's a few years old, and starts with a scene at the Creation Museum, then still under construction, where special guests were treated to a tour, by virtue of their having ponied up (or dinosaured up -- they both wear saddles, after all) $149 apiece to become "charter members."

Excerpt from a little later on:

The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."

A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.

On the front page.

Of The New York Times .

Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live , in which Larry asked the following question:

"All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?"

And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?

You know you want to: Read the whole thing.