I love the fake-science take of this very rational person. His idea of science is "The Day After Tomorrow" and that humans are descended from apes (we share an ancestor).

Harry, I am really beginning to think that it doesn't matter after all if creationism is taught in the public schools, really, since people like this seem to not to know anything about evolution (or more generally science) anyway. Perhaps the time would have been more profitably spent on chemistry or something, or we could just shorten the school year and save ourselves a couple of bucks.

�Zogby had Kerry ahead by a healthy margin. �

�Even before Election Day, I�d been experiencing uncharacteristic twinges of optimism. At cocktail parties, there had been a steady drumbeat of hopeful rumors. Arthur Schlesinger says the American people don�t like war. . . . Joe Klein,��

Priceless. His main source of info is cocktail parties. He relies on 3 of the most out-of-touch men in America.

And the Jews will be rounded up like in Philip Roth�s The Plot Against America.

And here I thought the problem with the Bush administration was that Ariel Sharon and the neocons (Jews, every one of 'em!) were running everything, using the US to fight Israel's enemies. That's what Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky said!

Is it too much to ask that if the Left insists on being paranoid and delusional, it could at least be internally inconsistent?

Few of us realize how many times a day we pass someone in the street who is actually as paranoid and detached from reality as Mr. Atlas seems to be.

I have three words for this guy:
Seek Professional Help.

I know he probably has his psychiatrist on spreed dial, but still...

Arthur Schlesinger? That's like referencing Robert Strange McNamara. No wonder the Left can't just let go of Vietnam.

I think people like this are fairly rare unless you are in the movie industry or live in Manhattan. He's embarassing, a self-parody.

I'm down with the fingerprinting of old SDS member thing, though.

Bart: Academia is FULL of these people. Heck, in many academic settings Kerry supporters are considered arch-conservatives. It's an incredibly intellectually stifling environment. In my case, for instance, I recently decided that there are certain other opportunities to utilize my astrophysical background (how to take images and spectral data of objects and figure out what you're looking at...) that don't require one to be surrounded by close-minded faculty types. Let's just say the past week doesn't make me regret the decision.

This was incredibly funny! James Atlas is a great humorist.

You guys need a cuckoo clock with a bird coming out that squawks JOKE!

Brian, I have long thought that 'teaching creationism in schools' was not merely a lost cause but an unwinnable one.

Despite Orrin's claim, I am not an evangel for darwinism, atheism or any other -ism.

I am, I guess, an evangel for honest study among the minority who claim to study anything at all.

If somebody can sit down and write out a page for creationism and a page that accurately reflects the theory of darwinism, and then says, 'I am persuaded by creationism,' that doesn't bother me.

Harry--

I was certainly not criticizing you--I was criticizing Atlas. Here's a guy who gets space regularly in every establishment magazine in New York and there's no way that he could perform your writing experiment.

But I'm sure he's all pissed about what they're teaching in Kansas.

brian,

You are correct about that but pedants make up a very small percentage of America's population. In my old math department, the chairman was the son of Earl Browder, the old Presidential candidate of the Communist Party in the 30s, who replaced William Z Foster as the candidate because Foster wasn't slavishly pro-Stalin enough.

pedants make up a very small percentage of America's population

And a very high percentage of media elites.

Hey! Not so hard on us pedants. I thought this was a pedant home-site. I value my pedantry almost as much as I do my service-rifle competition.