“Todd is the youngest and most impressionable member of the happy Flanders clan”
I swore off writing about Kersten yesterday. I just got around to remembering the old proverb that goes something like “The only person more foolish than a fool is someone who argues with a fool.” So, this column is not about Kersten, it’s about her defenders, (although I’m not sure that exempts me from the “more foolish” category.)
Today (hell, every day) the Strib editors scramble to find a way to justify their publishing of her drivel. Today they publish a letter from a high school student–a high school student, for God’s sake–in defense of their idiotic decision to continue to publish nonsense.
The argument this student puts forth is that “liberals” scream louder than conservatives. Yeah, and we have more rhythm, too.
But that’s not the worst. The worst was the “Letter of the Day” from Todd Flanders. First, having letters from Simpsons’ characters is bad enough, but letting him get away with equating conservative think tanks with legitimate universities is inexcusable. The unchallenged assertion that such think tank “scholars” work there because they can’t get jobs at liberal dominated universities is unsupported by anything other than conservative assertion, which I guess doesn’t differentiate it much from what the think tanks themselves turn out.
Anyone who does a modicum of research can easily find out that “think tanks” funded by conservative groups are bald faced attempts to pass off junk science as the underpinnings of conservative economic and social dogma. There’s no peer review of their findings, no checks to what they’re shoveling. They just take the money and publish what’s expected. They count on the public, and the editors of the Strib, evidently, to not know the difference. And so far they’re getting away with it.
That’s how we get Intelligent Design, Supply Side Economics, The Bell Curve, Social Security Reform, Gays as Destroyers of the Social Fabric, and the impending end of Public Education. And that’s how we get Katherine Kersten and a major metropolitan newspaper full of uncritical tripe published in the name of balance.
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