Fred Clark Explains It All

A while back, at dinner, I made my usual complaint that Slacktivist doesn’t get enough attention. Kate expressed some doubts, because he certainly seems to have a large number of readers and commenters.

The problem is, it’s not read by the people who really need to be reading it, and today provides an excellent example. Steve Benen at the new and prolific Washington Monthly is mystified by Sarah Palin:

Let’s not play games. Yes, there have been a variety of foreign policy maxims dubbed the “Bush Doctrine” over the years. If Sarah Palin heard the question and said, “Which one?” I would have gladly accepted that as a perfectly legitimate response. Indeed, if she’d answered the question under the assumption Gibson was asking about a different doctrine, that would have been fine, too. Hell, if Palin could have explained the differences between some of the various concepts that have been given the label, she would have shut up her detractors for a very long while.

But none of that happened. You can watch the video. She said she perceived the Bush Doctrine as the president’s “worldview,” which really doesn’t make any sense at all.

If he were reading Slacktivist, as all thinking people ought to do, he would’ve known the answer, because Fred Clark explained the whole “worldview” thing, eight hours earlier.

Read Fred Clark, people. His blog has the absolute best writing and reporting that you will find on religion and politics in America, by several orders of magnitude.

(I’m going through my feeds and catching up on the world post-conference, which is probably a mistake. Blasting through several days worth of political coverage is sort of like belly-flopping into a sewer…)

8 thoughts on “Fred Clark Explains It All

  1. Sarah Palin is poster girl for what all civilization has invested in getting shut of: Non tamen solam intendit interiorem, immo interior nulla est, nisi foris operetur varias carnis mortificationes; God’s dominion of poverty, hunger, disease, filth, death, and silk-clad priests with whips.

    Make your choice,

    1) In the whole of human history across the entire planet not one deity has volunteered Novocain.
    2) God said it, I heard it, that’s it.

  2. I definitely agree. Fred Clark writes some of the smartest artciles about religion and politics ont he web. He does not write as often as many bloggers, but everything he writes is well thought out.

  3. Thank you for the link, Chad. Fred Clark GOT IT when NY Times, Bloomberg, and WSJ missed it. Worldview. Wow!

    I want to know: which wack-job fact-free Fantasy does Palin believe:
    (1) young-earth creationism (as Fred Clark suggests, cf. 4004 BC);
    (2) Moderate centrist mildly wack-job creationism (i.e. admits “microevolution” but denies “macroevolution”; asserts that Darwin was Satanic);
    (3) Intentional lies and cult-status Intelligent Design (life on Earth created by a quarterback and two tight ends, namely a Designer to be named later, possibly an Extraterrestrial with woo-powered sci-fi abilities; but because of court decision in Delaware, not for now named “God”)?

    Waste of time to ask her: “Is the Earth Round or Flat.” She’ll say “round” and mean it.

    Important to me as an ex-Astronomy professor currently teaching Evolution and Ecology: How old is the planet Earth?

    If you put lipstick on a dinosaur, Noah will still not it on the Ark.

  4. Palin’s answer sounded so much like a student vainly trying to answer a question on a topic that she failed to study for with BS instead just leaving a blank.

  5. Sadly the GOP base isn’t interested in logic, argument or plans dealing with ‘issues’. That is the currency of the devil, or at least pointy-headed liberals seeking to confuse the ‘honest, decent and simple country folk of the heartland’.

    It is all too verbal and cerebral for their tastes. Tastes groomed and channeled by forty years of anti-intellectual propaganda from the GOP noise machine. It is a tie-in and extension of evangelical catechism that ‘Truth’ is revealed as a feeling and that both talking and thinking are the way evil puts one over on you.

    To the GOP base, values voters and evangelicals it doesn’t matter what Palin says. She could, sometimes does, speak in what amounts to word salad. She answers every question by randomly selecting a three line GOD boilerplate talking-point. It doesn’t answer the question. It has nothing to do with the question. But that’s not what talking points are about.

    Their purpose is to maintain a gut level impression of Palin, and indirectly McCain, as ‘one of us’, safe and a generally good person who is slightly pissed off at what “They” have done to “US” to get us into this bad state. Any non-sequitors, lack of logic or even common sense is taken as a projection of what happens when ‘good people’ are forced to talk to ‘the liberal media’ or otherwise intellectualize with the minions of evil.

    As long as Palin looks like and supports the illusion that she is ‘one of us’, has ‘The good of the nation’ at heart, is trying to ‘Do God’s will’ and ‘Means well’ then all gaffs, nonsense and outright lies will be overlooked.

    It doesn’t matter that she lies about the bridge. As long as she ‘feels’ like she did what she says. That she ‘would have’ or ‘intended’ to do what she claims. Had she only been given the opportunity she ‘would’ have made important executive decisions for the Alaska National Guard. That is ,for them, nearly the same thing as actually doing it. For the GOP base, in the end, it is all about good people, their feeling and their intention. Not facts, logic or results.

  6. I am not impressed with that post of Fred Clark’s. For one thing, if you think Ned Flanders represents an a-ok warm fuzzy cuddly Christian, you’ve totally been watching a different Simpsons than I have (or you think volunteering for an exocism sounds like a good time). For another, I simply don’t buy his categories of “ok Christians” and “badshit loony insane Christians”. Both assuredly exist, but I am not sure they are distinguished by support for Bob Jones, they certainly can’t be distinguished on the basis of homeschooling, and I’m unsure whether “worldview” is really as distinctive a catchphrase as he implies.

  7. I don’t find slacktivist all that enlightening from the several posts I’ve read. He’s basically writing for the progressive choir who have a cartoon view of evangelicals and the conservative base in general (see Art’s post above). There’s not much insight on in the the slacktivist postings that I can see, just a lot of (well written) snark. Anyway, I will reserve final judgment until I’ve read more of his writing since I do trust Prof Orzel’s recommendations.

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