Brayton’s Bag: Let’s mount the Triceratops and ride!

Saddled dinosaur: giddyup! (photo: williac via Flickr.com)

Idiotic quote of the week

There were lots of stupid things said at last weekend’s Values Voter Summit, but this one, by second-tier religious righter Star Parker, takes the cake:

Christians, according to Parker, have the solution for poverty: fear God, work diligently and manage your money.

“You know in a free country if you really believe that God is and you live right, you won’t be poor.”

Right. Because every poor person is an atheist or a Christian who just doesn’t pray hard enough.

By the way, this is precisely the sales pitch for the utterly fraudulent and corrupt Word of Faith movement, the notion that if you want to be rich, you have to prove your faith to God by sending money to His agent (the one telling you that you need to to this, conveniently). And if you do that and don’t get rich, obviously you don’t have enough faith. If this wasn’t done under the guise of religion, folks like Keith Butler and Kenneth Copeland would be in prison for fraud.

Rauch satirizes the McCain campaign

I know this is supposed to be a column with my own political jokes, but I can’t possibly do as well at satirizing the sheer chutzpa of the McCain campaign as Jonathan Rauch has in this wickedly funny sendup column in the National Journal. The gist of the piece is a conversation between McCain and his campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, as Schmidt tries to convince the boss that they can actually sell him as being younger than Obama. An excerpt:

“You may have heard of the law of the excluded middle. No? It’s from philosophy. Logic, to be specific. It says that if X, then not not X. Wait, bear with me. If a statement is true, then the negation of that statement cannot also be true. Otherwise everything could be true at once. You’d have fuzzy logic.”

“Steve –”

“We’ve figured out something. The law of the excluded middle is not in the Constitution. We looked. It’s not in any contract our party ever signed. It wasn’t even written by Republicans. It was written by left-wing academics.

“So at the convention last week, we send the former mayor of New York City to go out on prime time and ridicule Obama for being ‘cosmopolitan.’ We make Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Manhattan, the spokesman for small-town values. According to Democrat logic, he should be laughed off the stage. But the response goes off the charts.

“Why? Across America, people are fed up with so-called logical ‘laws’ that they never agreed to and that insult their values. They’re ready to fight back against cosmopolitan logic. We’ve tapped into that!”

Just brilliant.

“The Daily Show” on small-town values

It’s almost unfair to unleash “The Daily Show” during an election campaign. Their job is just too easy, especially with all that ridiculous blather about “small-town values” at the Republican National Convention. The video is hilarious.

John McCain, I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate

John McCain got a little carried away on the campaign trail this week while speaking about his running mate:

“She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.”

Well, as long as you’re being reasonable about this. By the way, Palin doesn’t seem to know that she’s supposed to know more about energy than anyone in the country because she doesn’t seem to have the first clue even about the energy produced in her own state. She said last week:

Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to this table, Charlie, and that’s with the energy independence that I’ve been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy, that I worked on as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, overseeing the oil and gas development in our state to produce more for the United States.

The fine folks at factcheck.org present bring us back to reality. The truth? 3.5 percent. To quote the immortal Bob Uecker: Juuuuust a bit outside.

“The Flintstones”: not a documentary

Of course, Palin’s confusion about oil and energy just might have something to do with the fact that she believes the Earth is only a few thousand years old; oil becomes pretty difficult to explain if you think human beings were riding around on dinosaurs a few thousand years ago. Salon.com quotes a Wasilla, Alaska, resident recounting a conversation with Palin:

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

This isn’t a big shock, of course; most Pentecostals are young Earth creationists. And here she displays the kind of casual ignorance that is common to those folks in the pews who have never studied any real science and have gotten their knowledge from creationist pamphlets. She no doubt refers here to the Paluxy tracks, a set of dinosaur footprints in a river bed in Texas side by side with what creationists once thought were human footprints. That notion was debunked long ago. It was originally debunked by creationists, in fact, but the word seems not to have gotten around to Palin.

I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, Sarah. Humans and dinosaurs did not live together. Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years before humans evolved. “The Flintstones” is a cartoon, you see, not a documentary. And that picture above of the triceratops with the saddle on it just a bit delusional.