Brayton’s Bag of Links and Snark: Debbie Does Darwin

This week’s snarkfest of blog links begins with Michigan’s favorite crazy daughter, Debbie Schlussel. For those who may not be familiar with Schlussel, picture Ann Coulter without the wit and charm. She’s the wingiest of wingnuts, seeing Arab terrorists behind every bush and under every bed. Having watched her over the years I’ve become convinced that she has spent most of her adult life wearing her tinfoil hat with the shiny side on the inside, which as any good conspiracy nut can tell you doesn’t keep out the crazy but only bounces your own crazy around inside your head.

Schlussel also fancies herself a movie reviewer, though her movie reviews are quite predictable. If she has some reason to think that anyone involved with the film is a liberal — for instance, if she once read an article about them wherein they admit to having known and liked a gay person at any time during their lives — then the film, by definition, is horrible and is an example of everything that’s wrong with America-hating Hollywood. And if the film shows anyone with olive skin as anything other than a terrorist, everyone involved in the film must be a no-good commie pinko terrorist. This week Schlussel is disappointed that she couldn’t get an advanced copy of the new documentary blaming Darwin for everything from high unemployment to the Holocaust:

Ben Stein’s PR people did not return repeated calls requesting a screener of “Expelled.” Dumb move.

Continued -

That’s okay, Deb, I’ve got your back. At the risk of ruining the ending of the movie, here it is: Darwin did it. Did what, you ask? Everything bad you can imagine. Darwin is the wellspring from which all racism and genocide flow. It’s a new version of that old creationist argument that goes like this: “When you teach children that they’re nothing more than animals, they’re going to act like animals.” Whenever a school is shot up by some nutball kid with absentee parents, the Endlessly Righteous immediately blame it on evolution, claiming that evolution leads to violence. And they’re right, of course; one need only look at the staggering rate of violence among molecular biologists and geneticists. Our prisons, after all, are bursting at the seams with paleo-anthropologists.

On a slightly saner front, Jack Lessenberry has an essay about the history of Jean Klock Park in Benton Harbor, a story that our own Eartha Melzer has been reporting on the last couple of weeks. Lessenberry tells the historical story of the park, which is named after a child who died in infancy. The land was given to the city with the agreement that it would “forever be used for bathing beach, park purposes, other public purposes, and all time shall be open for the use and benefit of the public.