Dumbing Down on Both Sides

“Both sides ought to be taught, so that students can understand the debate.”

That’s what our Great Leader has to say about the “debate” between evolution and creationism. And because he says it, NBC reports it. Accompanied by visuals of George W walking across the White House lawn in one of those helicopter to Oval Office shots which make him look presidential and leaderly. Compromise. Good call, there, Leader.

This comes after NBC shows some fuzzy bearded intellectual arguing that creationism should not be taught in the public schools. He is identified by NBC as “Creationism Critic” in contrast to Peter Sprigg, one of the nuts of the century, whose byline is “Family Research Council,” and who, like Fearless Leader, urges “true scientific debate.”

This is one of the big three news networks. Not the Ministry of Propaganda, FOX, but NBC, one of the old, tried and true, Big Three.

Fortunately, YouTube, the can-be antidote to America’s dumbing-down mechanisms caught the slant and put it out there for anyone looking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iazQge6WVqg

I commented the other day (“What, me graduate?”) that I can’t get over how many people argue Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq was the right one, and give as “proof” that “we haven’t had another 9/11.” The argument that my wearing clean underwear every day has kept me from catching cold is the same argument, but it’s asking too much for people to understand that because we live with such an embrace of irrationality and illogic.

This NBC slant on creationism is another case of not really understanding how illogical we can get on a national level. How low our educational standards have become. Most people miss it, because most people buy without thinking into the assumption “there are always two sides to every story.”

I’ve gone on about this before, about how hard it is for a Jew to listen to the suggestion that for every critic of Hitlerism we ought to give equal time to a neo-Nazi to debate the wisdom of the Holocaust. “So that students can understand the debate.”

The Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg, who comes across as the calm and reasoned voice of science in that NBC report, can be heard elsewhere, telling America he supports the exporting of homosexuals because they threaten the family. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/2008/03/frcs_sprigg_wan.html

Yes, “export.” I don’t even get to be deported where I’d at least get a seat on the plane instead of a box in the cargo. This guy Sprigg’s face is routinely splashed over the tube where he is made to look and sound respectable.

I also mentioned the other day that kids are dropping out of high schools in record numbers. And I left out the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger, on top of it all, is getting rid of some 20,000 teachers. http://www.blackvoicenews.com/content/view/41927/4/
The democrats are trying to head this off by taxing gas more (fat chance on that with these prices) or car registration fees, but the pink slips have already gone out.

Can’t tax yachts or private jets. We tried, but the State Legislature stopped that. http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/02/california_repu.php

So where are these kids supposed to learn that “there are two sides to every story” is a crock when one of the sides doesn’t provide reasonable evidence? Or correlation is not inevitably the same as cause-and-effect?

From NBC?