Steve M. spots an excellent example of the willful ignorance of our Village overlords. Joe Klein writes:
Huckabee was never an entirely plausible candidate for President–could we actually ever elect a man who has his doubts about evolution?
Ronaldus Maximus and Bush both pointedly refused to endorse evolution. Here’s Reagan:
During the 1980 campaign, he refused to endorse evolution, a touchstone issue among scientists, saying, “Well, [evolution] is a theory–it is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it was once believed.”
It’s fun to wank about how conservatives used to be reasonable (and if you go back far enough, you can probably even find a few examples), but they’ve been crazy for a long fucking time.
feebog
The Huckster has more than just doubts about evolution. He out and out does not believe in it. How did Noah get all them Dinosaurs on the ark anyway?
The Moar You Know
I can’t think of any candidate from either party who has not waffled on it when asked point-blank.
Sad, given their history, when I gotta look to the Catholic Church to find an institution that accepts modern science as valid, and that will say so in public without waffling, weasel-words, or bullshit.
Mike E
At least for the last 40+ years… see: Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
Mike Kay (True Grit)
On the other hand, Reagan never went to church.
JWL
“The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted… The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.”
Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, in 1979.
Zifnab
@The Moar You Know:
Evolution is one of those issues where if you take one side or the other, you’re guaranteed to lose voters. If you waffle, people won’t really care what you said.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
Even Ron Paul (a former medical doctor) rejects evolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyvkjSKMLw&feature=related
Ironically, Palin (of all people) believes in evolution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDrhVR8d2Gk&feature=related
JPL
@JWL: Cows fart also, too.
kdaug
Fixed. Now can we throw them out the window to test our “theory”?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Yeah, they started a Civil War, and killed a bunch of people for being black. Though we did call them Democrats back then.
gene108
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
Doctors and engineers are among the worst people to get into a scientific debate about. They are knowledgeable in their field and know enough math and science to generally understand other scientific disciplines.
This of course doesn’t make them all knowing, it just allows them to better justify their ignorance. You can’t present all the facts to prove something, because there are still some points being debated. They obsess on those points.
Whether it’s global warming or evolution, if they want to be a denialist, they really are a pain in the ass.
terraformer
@kdaug:
Aha! Advocating violence: both sides do it.
Fucking evolution – how does it work?
Mike in NC
The Huckster once declared: “I don’t believe in evolution, but I do believe in miracles”. Hard to comprehend why this remains a feature, and not a bug, in so much of 21st Century America.
Rick Taylor
I think Reagan was the turning point. Nixon was evil, but I’m not sure he was crazy, at least in the way modern day conservatives are crazy. To my astonishment, I find if I had to choose, I’d choose evil over crazy. It was with Reagan we started to get this almost religious fervor to conservatism, contempt for expertise, the sense that it was more important a candidate be one of us, someone you could share a beer with, than that they be smart or highly experienced. It’s been noted already that Reagan increased taxes and wouldn’t pass a conservative litmus test today, but I believe he altered the evolution of conservatism, resulting in where we are today.
danimal
Joe Klein’s statement says more about the villager media than it does about conservatives. For a long time, the village press has been the enablers of all the crazytalk from conservatives. All a conservative pol needed to do was give the villager press a wink and a nod–“I don’t really believe all the crazy things I say”–and the press would go along with the charade.
Now the true believers are saying the same things without the wink and the nod. It’s no longer a charade. We really are in danger of sabotaging our children’s scientific education, for example. We really might deport 11 million undocumented immigrants despite the economic and humanitarian disaster that would unfold. We really can start wars under false pretenses.
The stakes are higher. The press doesn’t have a clue how to expose the crazy because they have done such a poor job of framing issues accurately for the past 30 years.
Ash Can
I’m not saying Reagan wasn’t a cretin in his own right, but I would consider it plausible that he was simply mouthing what his handlers believed their shiny new fundie constituency wanted to hear. This was back in the first days of the GOP coalition with the Moral Majority, so I can see the possibility that this was just an exercise in solidifying that relationship.
Of course, the fact that there were people who could hear him say something this idiotic and vote for him anyway, well…
MonkeyBoy
Mike Huckabee’s just out book “A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion That We Don’t!)” could really use some help from you readers in adding descriptive tags. (you need to be logged into an Amazon account).
I like the current tag “keeping America stupid” though the existing tag, “pig vomit”, is rather distasteful. You can vote up existing tags or make up your own.
cleek
@feebog:
eggs and babies.
plus, and this is my favorite part: there are only 55 basic kinds of dinosaur. the rest are “descended” from those kinds.
“descended”. right. just don’t use the word “evolution” !
Comrade Mary
@The Moar You Know:
Does Obama count?
Clinton was also clear on this.
Bill Murray
@terraformer: we know much more about how evolution works than how gravity works.
Chris
@Rick Taylor:
I think Reagan was the turning point because he combined Nixon and Goldwater’s worst traits. Goldwater had the ideology, but not the electoral strategy. Nixon had the electoral strategy, but not the ideology. Reagan had both together, and every Repub since him’s been trying to follow that playbook.
Peter A
I suppose you could argue that rejecting evolution is even more idiotic today than it was in 1980. After all, every genetic and paleontological advance over the last 31 years has provided consistent support for evolution as the mechanism for biodiversity and the origins of the human species.
Marmot
Without a doubt.
And they’ve equated everything left of center (as well as the center itself) with The Enemy at least as far back as McCarthy. (OK, sure, much farther back than that.)
Then the enemy was socialists and communists. Now it’s socialists, communists, mooslims and anti-colonialists or something.
Heck, Reagan himself did it when speaking out against universal health care. “pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him.”
It’s a mystery to me why anyone treats movement conservatives as anything other than screwballs.
sukabi
willful ignorance of our Village overlords
is it willful ignorance, or do they only have ONE song? Seems like the same players have been playing the same song for the last 40+ years…
the problem is that The Village only changes players when one of them dies or goes off message…
so the question becomes, how do WE change the influence of The Village from the outside?
Peter
My head is spinning from trying to parse Reagan’s response. That’s one double conditional negative too many.
David Koch
God must exist because science can’t explain the tides.
Chris
@Ash Can:
This.
I think Reagan was a phony first and foremost, who hopped onto whatever bandwagon was popular at the time. In the 1930s/40s he was a union leader and New Deal Democrat, in the 1950s he hopped onto the HUAC bandwagon, in the 1960s the “reasonable anti-desegregationist” bandwagon, and by the time he was President the religious right had become a big deal, so he started mouthing that rhetoric too.
Meaningless rhetoric in the service of self-interest and opportunism: it’s the Reagan Legacy.
Joey Maloney
@Mike E: Nixon wasn’t stupid or addled; he was just evil. But under his watch the country was governed by and large (and modulo his paranoias) in a competent and reality-based fashion.
Ash Can
@David Koch: And don’t even get me started on those fucking magnets.
Elia
Last “reasonable” one by many standards is also one of the more odious and destructive, Nixon.
When I think back to conservatives I like, it’s pretty hard. It’s much easier to do that with Republicans, but all the Rs I’d feel sympathetic towards are, of course, RINOs. (Eisenhower, Rockefeller, Chafee, etc.)
Omnes Omnibus
@David Koch: I know that a king can stop them.
/Canute
The Moar You Know
@Mike Kay (True Grit): Ron Paul is full of shit. About everything.
Quicksand
It’s Ronaldus Magnus. Get your memes straight.
After all He was undeniably great, but I don’t think He was especially large.
Mike E
@Joey Maloney: Not implying either about Tricky Dick. He was the perfect player, and he ushered in a new “modern” era of conservatism that means All Things to certain people, if you know what I mean.
Corner Stone
“I think Democrats should realize that anyone coming to their party from the GOP who is over the age of 30 probably still has a warm spot for Reagan. I know I do. I still have my “peace through strength” buttons. I still recall all the stories about Reagan and Tip O’Neill. He was a charismatic guy, and for a lot of people like me, even though we know his policies may not have worked out for the best in the long term in every situation and in some cases were criminal, we still have a fondness for him. Sue me.”
~ John Cole circa Feb 2010
Bill Murray
@gene108:
as an engineering professor who works with many engineering professor that are human caused climate change denialists, I would say they obsess on points that were debated in the climate change community many years ago, not so much on more recent controversies
Corner Stone
I think a new tagline should go into heavy rotation:
“We keep fucking that chicken”
El Cid
__
Thank you.
They were a bit more restricted in certain policy areas, but they were as batshit crazy and far more bloodthirsty than G. W. Bush.
Iraq may have killed 100K or several times that amount, but that’s chickenfeed compared to the death squads and genocidalists Reagan hired throughout the world.
The batshit crazy nominees to office weren’t ideologically weirder than most Bush Jr. ones.
And the press largely kissed Reagan’s ass, too. They may have often been more confrontational in performance, but pretty much followed the Reaganite lines. And of course as always followed in lockstep whatever hawk death squad lies given in foreign policy — complete with retractions and career assaults when the government asked them to and when right wing activist groups screamed about how liberal the media was.
I believe that had Reagan had the sort of absolute majority on all 3 branches of government that Republicans had for four years under Bush Jr., we would have been discussing a greatly different Reagan record.
And I believe Reagan did really believe his shit. There were some issues on which he changed his mind, but the fact that he changed his tune by GE’s tutelage and turned on his fellow actors and unions doesn’t mean he didn’t actually change his opinions.
You didn’t have quite as many Jesse Helms in office, but you had plenty of them.
NonyNony
I’m sure that when confronted with this fact, Klein will point out that it was a perfectly reasonable stance to reject evolution 120-130 years after the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” but now that it is over 151 years old and has been the backbone of modern biology for over a century at this point it’s completely astonishing that any conservative candidate would reject it these days.
I mean, the cowardly author of “Primary Colors” shouldn’t have any problem weaseling his way out of this one.
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@Rick Taylor: I agree with this, and I prefer evil. The stupid is burning all of us.
Bob
@feebog:
He didn’t. Isn’t that why dinosuars are extinct?
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
Actually, the American population at large has been crazy a long fucking time. 60% either don’t believe in evolution, or “don’t have an opinion”. Only 40% accept the theory as truth.
Doug Hill
@Corner Stone:
I like it.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
And I think John should realize that Reagan inaugurated the New Gilded Age economics that have left us under-30 young’uns with such a titanic mess of an economy. The fact that the bastards was “charismatic” and that the people he’s talking about have a “soft spot” for him because of it carries very little water in the face of the shitstorm we inherited from him.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
A “soft spot” for Ronald Reagan? Show it to me, so I can plant the largest blunt object I can get my hands on in it. Unlike most of the sons of Belial who wander the earth fellating the rotting corpse of zombie Reagan, I was alive and politically conscious when that animate shitpile was in office, and I have to tell you that anyone who talks about Reagan’s communication skills or charisma is out of their goddamned minds. The man was a largely incoherent asshole whose greatest rhetorical gift was the ability to string whole clauses of racist tripe into soundbytes. If there is any justice in the Universe, Ronald Reagan wakes up daily in hell daily with AIDS, and suffers the profoundest ills of every human being I and those I love buried while that maundering fuckwad pranced through his administration.
Pedant
It’s fun to wank about how conservatives used to be reasonable (and if you go back far enough, you can probably even find a few examples), but they’ve been crazy for a long fucking time.
Not that long. Edmund Burke was really quite sane.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
A “soft spot” for Ronald Reagan? Show it to me, so I can plant the largest blunt object I can get my hands on in it. Unlike most of the sons of Belial who wander the earth fellating the rotting corpse of zombie Reagan, I was alive and politically conscious when that animate shitpile was in office, and I have to tell you that anyone who talks about Reagan’s communication skills or charisma is out of their goddamned minds. The man was a largely incoherent asshole whose greatest rhetorical gift was the ability to string whole clauses of racist tripe into soundbytes. If there is any justice in the Universe, Ronald Reagan wakes up daily in hell with AIDS, and suffers the profoundest ills of every human being I and those I love buried while that maundering fuckwad pranced through his administration.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
Double posted trying to edit. FYWP
gene108
@Bill Murray:
Maybe they haven’t caught up to speed.
What irks me about the engineering type denialists is they make it easy for hacks to come in and try to wipe out all the science that’s been done. It allows the hard core anti-science crowd to use whatever they refuse to accept as evidence all science is just a belief system, just like religion.
Just because there’s doubt about ‘x’, doesn’t mean science hasn’t solved ‘a’,’b’,’c’,’d’,’e’,’f’,’g’,’h’…’w’ already and there are 23/26 pieces of evidence that confirms the prevailing view.
I know people like to point to doubt in the evolution community, but people aren’t jumping ship and claiming there’s a young Earth, flood, etc. that caused everything. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, a couple of revolutionary ideas were shaping the natural sciences. One was plate tectonics, which was proposed in 1968 and spent the better part of 10 years being debated as to if it was right and what parts of geology and paleontology it covered.
Prior to plate tectonics unifying how geologic formations occurred, you had theories like geosynclines to explain mountain building. Just because geosynclines proved to be an invalid theory, does not invalidate the fact that large portions of the Appalachian Mountains contain rocks and fossils deposited in swamps.
The anti-science crowd wants to conflate these things.
Anyway, another big thing that shook up evolutionary study was the theory a big meteor hitting the Earth blew up the dinosaurs. Darwinism requires a stable environment and long periods of time, where animals can develop and better traits get selected and bred into future generations, while the “losers” die off.
Plate tectonics stood the idea of stable environments on its head, since land masses were moving a round and so the Earth’s climate would’ve gone through changes that would effect natural selection. The meteor impact theory went against Darwinism. You don’t have long periods of time of uninterrupted change. You may have a sudden event that wipes out large numbers of critters and the survivors may have survived because they were far away from the impact site.
This is probably what Reagan was referring to when he said there doubts about evolution. How to deal with Darwin’s theory, given the new geologic evidence.
I really wish reporters were more scientifically literate, so when someone says there’s doubt in the scientific community about evolution, they can retort, “yes, there’s a debate between Darwinism and punctuated equilibria, but no one’s talking about the Earth being 6,000 years old”.
RSA
I think this is misleading, the bit about scientists, in the sense that any indisputable theory or fact in science could be a touchstone, if there are enough stupid people who want to do battle over it.
Stefan
Huckabee was never an entirely plausible candidate for President—could we actually ever elect a man who has his doubts about evolution?
It’s inexcusable. Joe Klein is a political correspondent, it’s literally his job to keep on top of these things, and yet I knew and he didn’t that Reagan and both Bushes all claimed to have their doubts on evolution. The Republicans can get away with this nonsense for so long precisely because Villagers like Klein enable them and never inform the public about what these people really stand for.
merl
the Theory of Gravity is just a theory but I don’t expect to float away.
Stefan
I think Reagan was the turning point. Nixon was evil, but I’m not sure he was crazy, at least in the way modern day conservatives are crazy. To my astonishment, I find if I had to choose, I’d choose evil over crazy.
You can be evil and competent. Crazy and competent, not so much.
Corner Stone
@merl:
What I recently found out via Science Channel is that you only need to travel at 7 miles per second to defeat gravity.
So it’s kind of a fucking punk when you think about it.
Triassic Sands
There have always been crazy Republicans. The difference now is that there aren’t any sane ones. (After all, evolution is not the only measure of wackosity.)
And the Horse He Rode In on
@Rick Taylor: I think you are forgetting the third element – you mention crazy and evil, but don’t forget about stupid. For example, Cheney would be evil, but not stupid or crazy. McMegan is evil and stupid, but probably not crazy. Glenn Beck is evil and crazy, but not stupid. Michelle Bachmann is the trifecta – stupid, crazy and evil
Delia
I don’t think Reagan was crazy or cretinous (although it does seem the first signs of Alzheimer’s were starting by his second term.) I don’t think any scientific theory was very important to him personally so if there were political points to be made with the people who would vote for him by walking away from it, he did. Very rational from his perspective. Politicians do it all the time.
Not that I approve, of course. And you can see it as one step in the process by which goopers have gotten to the point of batshit crazy all the time. But not in itself irrational for a politician wooing a certain portion of the electorate.
Wile E. Quixote
And once again The Onion drives it home.
Embarrassed Republicans Admit They’ve Been Thinking Of Eisenhower Whole Time They’ve Been Praising Reagan
Perfect Tommy
Pop Quiz:
Who said: “I am inaugurating a program to marshal both government and private research with the goal of producing an unconventionally powered virtually pollution free automobile within five years.”
Answer
kdaug
@terraformer:
No, no. First floor window. Scratches from the bushes, tops.
gene108
@Stefan:
You do realize, if a Republican candidate said, “evolution is settled science and it’s not a matter of believe or not believe, because the facts are what they are and it is the best, testable, theory available to explain those facts”, he or she would lose whatever nomination they were seeking?
The Republican base demands their candidates deny evolution. Maybe that wasn’t the case, when Reagan ran, but it sure as hell is now (maybe in no small part thanks to him).
Wile E. Quixote
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
Yet despite all of that he still beat Jimmy Carter and kicked the living shit out of Walter Mondale. I mean Walter Mondale, what the fuck was the Democratic party thinking in 1984? “Yeah, the voters rejected Jimmy Carter four years ago, so we’ll run his vice president this year. Oh, and let’s pick a completely undistinguished member of the House to be his vice president and when we do so make sure that we don’t completely vet this person so that there will be embarrassing revelations that the Republicans can use against us.”
Mondale’s selection in 1984 is the second dumbest thing the Democratic party has ever done, the dumbest being getting the US involved in Vietnam in 1964.
Wile E. Quixote
@Stefan:
Shorter Joke Line: “Fucking Google. How does it work?”
Wile E. Quixote
@Chris:
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you can see that John is completely and fully cognizant of this fact and posts about it regularly.
About that soft spot thing though, my parents generation has a soft spot for JFK, but when you look at JFK’s record it’s hard to reconcile what the man actually did with what he’s remembered for. During the 1950s both of the Kennedy brothers jumped on the Joe McCarthy bandwagon and were cold warriors. Kennedy ran as a hawk in the 1960 elections, falsely claiming that there was a missile gap and that the Soviet Union had thousands of ballistic missiles aimed at the United States when in fact they only had a handful of missiles. Go read the transcripts of the Kennedy/Nixon debates, Nixon comes off as the more reasonable of the two candidates.
Kennedy then started playing brinksmanship games with the Soviet Union and as a consequence of these World War III almost started in October of 1962. Kennedy also escalated American involvement in Vietnam. Eisenhower had kept US involvement to a minimum because as a former soldier he understood that a war in Vietnam could never be won. Kennedy began ramping up US involvement in Vietnam as soon as he entered office, and despite what various Kennedy hagiographers have claimed over the years, there’s no evidence that he would have pulled US troops out after the 1964 election or that things would have been any different had he not been assassinated in Dallas. The Kennedy administration was heavily involved in the November 1963 coup that overturned the government of Ngô Đình Diệm.
Then there’s civil rights and the Great Society. Kennedy’s major contribution to both of these was to serve as a useful martyr. Kennedy did virtually nothing about civil rights during his time in office, indeed Eisenhower did more for civil rights than Kennedy ever did just by virtue of appointing Earl Warren to the Supreme Court and then backing the court’s decisions by federalizing the national guard and sending troops to Little Rock in 1957.
Lyndon Johnson deserves the credit for passing the Civil Rights act of 1964 and for enacting the Great Society programs. He also deserves to be blamed for continuing the Kennedy administration’s policies in Vietnam and escalating the war, but again, there’s no evidence that Kennedy would have done things any differently had he lived and a lot of reason to doubt that a Boston Brahmin like Kennedy would have done as much for civil rights and anti-poverty programs as Johnson did. Indeed if Johnson has rejected the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policies he still would have won in 1964 and probably could have run again in 1968. It wasn’t civil rights that destroyed the Johnson administration, it was Vietnam.
But despite all of this the boomers still have this huge nostalgia for JFK and for his opportunistic little shit of a brother Bobby.
Paul W.
@Triassic Sands: This. People act like a party is uniform… and while in general they arent, what’s left of the Republicans either are by deliberate action or by willful ignorance. Texas was full of good hearted Republicans when I left it in 2004, now not so much.
McJulie
@Zifnab: Evolution for some, miniature American flags for others!
Cris
In fact, the dinosaurs were recruited by the fallen angels into a last-minute effort to destroy the Ark.
les
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
Not to worry, Rev, the style bore repeating. Nice.
Anne Laurie
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
Since I believe in reincarnation, I’ve always voted for ‘now living as a poor woman in one of the many warfare-ridden hellholes he did so much to develop’. The Congo, Colombia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan… the man was truly a Global Master. They should’ve called him the Fifth Horseman.