The caption to this post is from Christopher Hitchens' column over at Slate today. The title to his article, however is only the beginning of the bitch slapping he gives the Republican Party and John McCain for the lunacy of nominating Sarah "Caribou Barbie" Palin for the VP slot on the GOP ticket. I have bashed Palin plenty not because I am anti-woman or anti-religion, but because she's an idiot and crazy religious fanatic who - as is typical of such people - doesn't have the ability to recognize her own gigantic limitations. Oh, and did I mention that she's a pathological liar too?*
Hitchens, like many former supporters of the GOP who are jumping ship and going to vote for Obama, is incensed by how low the GOP has been dragged by the Neanderthals who now principally constitute the party base and by those who would pander to them. He correctly calls the GOP ticket an appalling contempt for knowledge and learning. Here are some column highlights:
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In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, . . . it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."
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It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation.
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It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research. . . . With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools . . . and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now.
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This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
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