Saturday Hodgepodge

Bedwetting bloggers, propaganda instead of policy, a school principal with the right stuff, and the hypothetical Christian life… all in today’s hodgepodge.

In Fear and Loathing in the Nuttersphere, Kevin K. describes perfectly the atmosphere of bedwetting hysteria that permeates the right-wing blogs:

[T]he fear is still deeply palpable in the nuttersphere… and its occupants are tragically becoming increasingly unglued as Dear Leader’s numbers slip and the much-bungled War in Error has finally morphed into a very sore spot for a way-large swath of Americans. The fear factor hasn’t just been ratcheted up lately due to a fear of the United States’ capture by illegal Mexican dishwashers or Iran’s miraculous plug-and-play nuclear arsenal, but also because of the bedwetters maddening (and mostly unacknowledged) concern that a majority of their fellow countrymen aren’t at all pleased with how the ruling party has been running things of late.

... [I]nsanely masturbatory fantasies about blowing innocent people to smithereens and nuking Mecca are now so commonplace in the nuttersphere that they’ve become part of its fabric. “THEY WANT TO KILL US ALL!” has been the frequent wide-eyed yelp of these terrified simpletons who prefer their pants tailored for that scaredy look, but now that the whole democracy-at-the-barrel-of-a-gun thing isn’t going quite as planned in the Middle East thanks to rampant neoconjob buffoonery, some of them have come to the totally irrational conclusion that we should just lay waste to “EVRY-FUCKING-THING.”

Arthur Silber examines the Iran-is-getting-nukes-tomorrow meme, and concludes that whatever the intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program may indicate, it just doesn’t matter: this administration uses intelligence not to guide policymaking, but to propagandize for policies established before the facts were in:

A crucial part of the Iran propaganda campaign has been to steadily reduce the relevant time horizon, as I noted in this essay. The administration began with estimates of approximately a decade before Iran could have nuclear weapons—which then got reduced to five years—which then was further shrunk to a year or two—then to a few months—and now they are offering ludicrous stories about Iran having nukes within 16 days. Let me repeat the critical point: this is all propaganda. It doesn’t matter in the least that they say this is what the intelligence indicates. Even if it were accurate, which almost all of it is not, the intelligence is not the foundation of the administration’s foreign policy, with regard to Iran or more broadly.

In fact, I have thought for a few years that the decision to attack to Iran was made some time ago. I am more convinced of that now than I ever was before. The constant stream of scare stories about Iran is designed only to terrify the American public sufficiently, so that when Bush holds a press conference to announce air strikes against Iran that have already begun, enough people will believe that the strikes were necessary—since Iran was about to launch nuclear weapons against us momentarily.

PZ Myers notes that a school board member in Kansas took it upon herself to become a censor, and was told in no uncertain terms by the school principal where to get off.

And in If I Were Christian, DarkSyde muses about what life would be like for him if he had a different religious outlook:

If I was a Christian I’d thank God for including me in this Cosmos in all its resplendent majesty. I’d study every branch of science I could and hunger for more every day. I’d be teaching biology and chemistry and astronomy in Sunday Schools along side Biblical verse to eager young Christian children who would learn reverence for those fields of knowledge. I would note the truth that molecular biology has revealed: We are all one family, every man a brother, all women sisters, and each of us is our brother’s keeper.