Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

This is a cut and paste job from http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13428.

I think the illustrative sentence, for all three of what I call the great premises of Idiot America came from The New York Times, which was talking about the intelligent design movement. And the sentence that appeared on the front page of The New York Times is called the intelligent design movement -- "a politically savvy challenge to evolution." Which is self-evidently ridiculous. It's like deciding that you're going to have an agriculturally savvy challenge to Newtonian geometry. It doesn't work.

It doesn't matter how many people vote for the candidate of the Alchemy Party ticket. He's not going to be able to change lead to gold. It doesn't matter how many people in the Gallup Poll think they should be able to flap their arms and fly to the moon -- they're not going to be able to do it. So when you have The New York Times, on the front page, posing a self-evidently ridiculous notion like a politically savvy challenge to evolution -- actually it's not. It's a politically savvy challenge to the poor bastards who are trying to teach high school biology.