Free The Animal

Greg Swann quoted the best part. I’ll take on the second best. And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!” The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.) And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood…

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While Justin Raimondo does a decent job of showing that neither John Derbyshire nor Jonah Goldberg understand Ron Paul, he doesn’t quite nail it all the way, I think. But first, this captures the essence of the smear campaign against Paul, when Goldberg says, “The left is perfectly happy to blur the lines between a mainstream conservative and a Klansmen,” and Raimondo responds: One can just substitute the word “neocon” for “liberal,” in the above, and come up with the reason why Paul should ignore the Smear Brigade and soldier on: because we all know the neocons are “perfectly happy” to “blur the lines” between a paleocon-libertarian and a Klansman. Yes, the point I made yesterday. It’s for very good reasons that Raimondo and others, including myself, think that Paul ought to keep ignoring this whole thing and simply refuse to comment on it at all, or do anything else “politicians are supposed to do.” And there’s the real crux of it, the part Raimondo danced around a bit, but didn’t quite nail. This would be the point of agreement between Goldberg and Derbyshire. Did you catch it? Derbyshire says, “All I took away from that American Thinker piece was…

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