Political correctness is THAT bad?

Somehow or another, I got on the email list for this amusingly wretched blob of spam from the Worldview Weekend. The people who put out this stuff seem to worship at the church of Jesus John Birch Christ, combining the most intolerant forms of Christianity with the paranoia of the Montana militia types. "Hysterical" is almost too mild a word to describe some of this stuff.

But once in awhile, I worry that they might be right and I should be far more frightened of those liberals than I am. Here is a headline from one Brannon Howse that terrifies me:

The Ft. Worth columnist that did the yellow journalism piece on Brannon and the Biblical Worldview Code Blue Rally e-mails one of our listeners and tells him that he thinks that political correctness is about being polite to people.

A confession! Straight from the mouth of one of the liberals himself! I knew political correctness was an evil mecahnism to break down my knowledge of good and evil, but on top of that, it turns out to be a secret plot to make me be polite? Holy jumpin' Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Underdog, will the wickedness never end?

The superior intellect

Mike Dunford, at The Questionable Authority, points us to the Conservapedia article about the moon, which has this to say about theories of lunar origins:

Origin theories

Atheistic theories of the origin of the Moon, widely taught for decades despite lacking the falsifiability requirement of science (see Philosophy of science), have been proven false.[9]

The footnote, by the way, points to a page at the Planetary Science Institute's web page, describing the strengths of the theory that the moon is a piece of the Earth which got whacked off in a big collision with other pieces of planet-wannabees while the solar system was still coalescing. There's nary a word about this theory, or any other, having been proven false. Is it any surprise that the writers at Conservapedia don't understand what a citation is, or that it's supposed to provide supporting evidence for your claims? Who else would be telling you they've falsified the unfalsifiable?

It still pleases me that, while there are some silly and ignorant liberals around, there is no market for an endless parade of demagogues like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and even God can't keep track of how many others, and there is no Liberalpedia.

Stumbled upon

I can't help it.

Now it gets complicated

I forgot where I saw this comment, so I can't link to it ... blogger crime, I know. Anyway, it was just a parenthetical comment that said the writer was going to miss President Bush's regular supply of outrages, or something to that effect. I'm ashamed to admit, but at a certain level, I feel the same way.

Bush was the most consistent cuss I've ever seen. Except for spending money to fight AIDS in Africa, he seemed to be wrong on everything. Everything! I mean, I used to say that no one could be wrong all the time, if only because of the law of averages, but dang if that fellow didn't come near proving me wrong. I hated almost everything he did. Which was, in a way, comforting. I always knew where things stood with Bush.

You see, now I have to bitch about Obama, who I mostly admire, and who I definitely want to do well. But then he turns around and doesn't turn things around - I mean, this damned email investigation he wants to quash, or the trial in England that can't go forward because the nature of CIA torture is a state secret, or secrecy about domestic wiretapping, and the same damn crap that Bush/Cheney threw at us for eight years. Now I have that ambiguity again of decent folks (I do think he is decent) doing bad things. It's so much more comfortable when the people doing the bad things are the bad guys and you know they're bad because they do bad things every day and then boast about it. It's another form of that "moral clarity" that Bush prattled about in order to praise his own simple-mindedness. I've lost that, and it's a good thing to lose, but I'm going to miss it nonetheless.

Oh well, I still have the fundamentalists.

Transparent government? Nope.

Distracted as he may be by the economic crisis, Obama is fast running out of excuses for why he talked a good game about open government, but in reality his DOJ is backing Bush positions on concealing records at every turn. The latest:

Obama’s DOJ quietly sought dismissal of missing White House emails lawsuit

But despite it all, the newly minted Obama administration said in court papers that the issue revolving around the missing emails is “moot” because some steps, however incomplete, had been taken by the Bush White House to preserve and restore missing emails, even though the work has been conducted under the cover of secrecy by an unknown outside contractor hired by Bush administration officials.

*snip*

In a mid-January court filing that sought dismissal of the lawsuit, the Justice Department claimed that the 14 million emails were never actually “missing,” rather the emails were simply unaccounted for due to a “flawed and limited” internal review by the Office of Administration in 2005. The documents were retrieved, the Justice Department claims, “through a three-phased email recovery process.”

*snip*

Obama’s Justice Department appears to have taken the Bush administration on its word that a good faith effort has been made to restore missing emails, according to CREW’s 24-page motion arguing against having the case dismissed.

“One day after the Bush administration ended, defendants filed a motion to dismiss that reflects an incredibly cynical and narrow view of defendants’ obligations under the Federal Records Act (“FRA”),” the watchdog group’s court filing says. “According to defendants, because they have taken some action -- no matter how flawed, incomplete or limited -- the first four counts of plaintiffs’ complaints are now moot. Hiding behind technical jargon and theoretical constructs, defendants attempt to obscure three basic facts: we still do not know how many emails are missing; we still do not know the source of the problem that caused emails to be missing in the first place; and we still do not know if the problem has been fixed.