On and on it goes

This morning I read a commentary written by Jimmy Carter and my stomach turned at the blatant falsehoods he presents. Tonight I read a commentary by Cathy Young in which she presents outright falsehood as "fact". Why should it surprise and upset me so much that main stream media is so willing to print such garbage? I wish I had an answer. I wish it didn't upset me so much, but it does. Maybe I just place too much value on the truth.

In the Jimmy Carter piece, titled "This isn't the real America", Jimmy makes the claim that America is becoming a repressed totalitarian state (funny, I sort of felt that way when he was president) where the rich steal from the poor.....legally of course with help from Bush's tax cuts........Big Brother is invading our privacy.........the water, air and earth are deadly environmental abominations, and torture of innocents is rampant (sort of like Iraq before we invaded and set 25 million people free).

This is the Jimmy Carter who as President of the United States in 1979-80 allowed 66 Americans to be held hostage in Iran for 444 days. It was a sad time for the U.S., but apparantly a time Jimmy is proud of. Here is how his Presidential Library describes Carter's lack of action......." He pursued a policy of restraint that put a higher value on the lives of the hostages than on American retaliatory power or protecting his own political future." Talk about understatement. All of America was held hostage by a few radical students in a less than two bit middle-eastern nation, but Jimmy was showed "restraint" by doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about it. Now, 26 years later, one of the hostage takers, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, emboldened by Jimmy's restraint, is President of an extremely militant and ever increasingly anti-American Iran, and is boldly calling for the destruction of America.

In Jimmy's world America would sit back after an incident like 9/11, smoke a Cuban cigar, ask Kofi Annan if he would please help us recover, request that all Americans go into poverty so we can build up a warchest just in case we need it, then sit and hope it doesn't happen again, all the while proclaiming the need for restraint in order to keep the honor of America clean.

Jimmy's distortion of the truth goes far deeper than his mischaracterizations of the current state of affairs in the world. His library makes the claim that "President Carter's actions brought freedom for the hostages with America's honor preserved." The hostages were released upon the innauguration of Ronald Reagan as President. Apparently the Ayatollah Khomeini had reason to fear the new president of the U.S. (maybe he had visions of cruise missiles entering his bedroom)

But Jimmy's biggest concern is "a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable". Man, me too!! As an example of this unimaginable mixing of church and state he cites...............NOTHING. NADA. ZIP. ZERO. But he really doesn't need to, because he's Jimmy Carter, the most caring man in the entire universe, and everyone knows that if he says it it's the gospel.

America thought it was cute to elect a peanut farmer from Georgia President. I guess we got what we deserved.

In the Cathy Young piece, titled "Fact and fiction on evolution" fiction is presented as fact as though nobody might notice. She turns the current state of reality in "the evolution debate" into a simple game of "It's true because I say so". Yes Mommy!! NOT!! She makes the absurd claim that "The evolutionary theory of origins of species is supported by abundant evidence from the fossil record and genetics research" OH REALLY? So the "missing link" has been found? This is such a highly debatable point that it's incredible anyone would make that statement. Of course no missing links have been found. Something Darwin said would happen thousands of times over in just a few years after he first proposed his theory. She makes the bushleague mistake of presenting the evidence for "micro-evolution" as proof of "macro-evolution". In essence she believes that since there is adaptation within specie, one specie could easily become a different specie given billions of years. Of course the more we learn about DNA and the formation of all living things the more we can believe that no specie can become another specie and reproduce similar offspring. DNA dictates the specie, not the other way around.

Later in her hit piece on evolution theory dissenters she claims that Darwinian Evolution cannot be a "vehicle for atheism and materialism" because "Darwin was a Christian". No, Darwin was not a Christian, nor did he claim to be. Whoever Cathy Young is, she is lazy minded beyond belief. A google search of the words "Charles Darwin Christianity" offered up many sources that point to Darwin's lack of belief in Jesus Christ as Savior (the definition of being a Christian). Here's a quote from Darwin's autobiography she could have found in 45 seconds of searching..........."I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. This is a damnable doctrine...". Darwin was a very mixed up man who, after coming up with the theory of evolution, pointed to the fact that evolution cannot explain the creation of complex things when he said "to suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances....could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

She goes on to name many Christian groups that say "evolutionary science is not incompatible with the basic tenets of religious faith". True enough. But it is incompatible with the Biblical account of creation, which is a basic plank of Christianity. Obviously Christians are not afraid of science as we believe if it proves anything it will prove that the world is "wonderfully and fearfully made", obviously by someone vastly more wise than random chance.

I'm not against peoplelike Jimmy Carter and Cathy Young having their say, I'm just so tired of hearing it stated as such rock solid truth, as though any discussion of the facts they propose is heresy. And they say is the fundamentalist Christians who lack tolerance. Oh my!!