Is America Exceptional? What makes you think so?

It's been a week since I've posted anything here.  Well, I did write one a few days ago but my computer ate it before I could get it posted and I was so pissed I gave up for the day.

I have spent the whole month of August in total awe of how quickly we are circling the toilet bowl.  While millions of Americans are still out of work our politicians in Washington are fighting to see who can cut the most jobs in the months and years ahead.  At a time when we desperately need government to find a way to infuse the economy with money to jump start demand, we're starving the beast.  At a time when we desperately need exceptional FDR-type leadership, we are offered a choice betwen a milquitoast and one of a dozen clowns.

Let me riff on something Doghouse Riley wrote Friday in a post entitled "With Luck, The Capitalists Will Innovate A New Knot To Hang Themselves With,"

IF there was anything to American Exceptionalism--other than the fact that we dominate a hemisphere, and came out of two European global wars physically unscathed and economically better off than when we went in--wouldn't it show up in our politics? Wouldn't we have the wisest counsel, the fullest debate, the most [talented, brilliant politicians]?

Would we have [Rick Perry as the leading Republican candidate for President]?

We lead the world in stand-up comedy, popular music, and number of things we think we lead the world in.

We invented free, public, and sorta-universal-if-you-squinted-some education, simultaneously with the idea that academic truth was amenable to first-century superstition and the willful hallucinations of Texas school boards. The salient feature of our history is that we took every bit of our Land from its original owners by invasion, by force, and by swindle, the latter just for practice, and we imported, then bred, human beings to tend our crops, serve our meals, and wash our feet, as our property. While we thanked God. It took a bloody and incompetent struggle to end it, and after twenty years of moderately trying to make small amends we gave up and told white Southerners it was really okay with us if everybody pretended they'd won.

Ugh!  The truth hurts, but try telling this to the small-dick patriots chanting We're Number One!  America Rules!  Suck on this Muslims!

If America really was exceptional (in the way we would like to believe), then Rick Perry, and his fellow clowns like Bachmann, Huckabee, Palin, Cain, etc. would be consigned to fringe status and only noticed as fodder for late night TV comedians. 

Let's start with climate change.

Climate change may be the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced. We don't know for sure, but there's a good chance that if we allow this process to go unchecked, or accelerate the change through expanded use of fossil fuels, warming may actually topple 11,000 years of progress. At the very least, it looks to cost untold lives and unimaginable fortunes as desertification overtakes farmland, oceans invade both land and freshwater environments, storms ramp up to previously unwitnessed ferocity, and millions (if not billions) of people are forced to pick up and move. It's a problem of daunting, almost unimaginable scale. ...

Here's Perry response to a question about climate change.

"I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. I don’t think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective, is more and more being put into question."

When Perry says that "a substantial number of scientists have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects," that's just a staggering claim. It's an attempt to write the charges leveled during the laughable "climate gate," into the history books, despite the fact that all of those accusations have been prove[d] over, and over, and over to be insubstantial. Even those politicians who voiced similar statements during the heat of the moment when the accusations were first leveled have some excuse. They jumped the gun. They failed to wait until the charges could be checked out. ...

That's not true for Perry. The charges have long been tested and found wanting. The scientists involved have been universally vindicated.

Perry doesn't let that slow him. He levels a blanket charge, one that includes not one name or a single example of wrongdoing. He follows this up with an equally odd statement, that there's been a steady stream of scientists newly-awakened to the idea that man-made climate change is not happening.

And so on.  Mark Sumner angrily shreds Rick Perry's answer and shows that Perry is nothing more than one of those Americans who prefers fairy tales to reality.

Need more?  Let's move on to evolution.  PZ Myers points us to Richard Dawkin's rant about the "ignorance of Rick Perry specifically and the Republican party generally."

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today's Republican party...is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today's Republican Party 'in spite of' is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

Any other organization -- a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society - -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

A politician's attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry's and the Tea Party's pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician's attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

Dawkins provides one of the most articulate and convincing arguments for the Republican party being comprised of ignorant dolts that I've read in a long time.

Dawkins points out that among America's 330 million plus population we have some of the brightest people in the world.  So why does our media treat ignorant dolts like Perry like reasonable, qualified candidates to lead one of the most important countries in the world?  Is America exceptional?  Hard to believe isn't it?

--Trakker

Comments

[Dan D. Doty]

And here's the big question.

Why are you still here?

[horsec]

Agents are often more formidable than principals

On the question of whether Congress should provide aid to the states hit by hurricane, downgraded to tropical storm, "Irene," David Brooks (on Newshour) suggest that every congressman should have a wall poster explaining the difference between "millions" (Irene aid), "billions" and "trillions."

The morons in congress think millions, as a percentage of government cost to the right of the decimal point, are important.

Not a stick of gum to comfort a child without a corresponding cut somewhere else. The rainy day comes and congress wants perpetual umbrellas for the rich?