Re: ID piece
Subject: Re: ID piece
From: Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com>
Date: 7/20/09, 19:56
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
CC: "Bishop, Justin" <Justin_Bishop@condenast.com>

Re: ID piece This is great, Barrett! Thanks so much. I’m going to have our research editor give it a glance before we go up, if that’s cool with you.

Best,
Mike


On 7/19/09 6:28 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, Michael-

Here's the Krauthammer piece; let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

Kicking Krauthammer

   When Barack Obama began positioning himself as a presidential aspirant towards the end of 2006, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was encouraging. Obama, he wrote at the time <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2006/10/27/barack_obamas_future> , has "an affecting personal history." More importantly, he is much akin to another once-popular presidential aspirant, Colin Powell; both, as it turns out, are black. "Race is only one element in their popularity,"Krauthammer noted, "but an important one. A historic one. Like many Americans, I long to see an African-American ascend to the presidency. It would be an event of profound significance, a great milestone in the unfolding story of African-Americans achieving their rightful, long-delayed place in American life." Though the column made a strong case for Obama's candidacy in terms of his identity, it included not a word concerning what the senator might bring to the table in terms of policy.

    Less than two years later, Krauthammer expressed disgust with those <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2008/03/14/an_election_about_identity,_not_policy?page=1>  who would make the case for Obama's candidacy in terms of his identity, rather than his policies. "The pillars of American liberalism - the Democratic Party, the universities and the mass media - are obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender," he helpfully explained, adding that the 2008 Democratic primary represented "the full flowering of identity politics. It's not a pretty picture."

    Regardless of what views he may think he holds regarding the legitimacy of Obama's personal appeal, Krauthammer has plenty of other, presumably firmer stances on the president and his doings, and has in fact emerged as the most significant of the administration's right-wing critics. In a profile piece that made the rounds last May <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22743.html#ixzz0LSkP9aWM> , Politico's Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be "a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president" and a "central conservative voice" in the "Age of Obama;" New York Times mainstay David Brooks recently characterized him as "the most important conservative columnist right now." When Krauthammer was presented with an award this summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate him <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/03/krauthammer-wins-breindel-award-excellence-journalism/> . In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an award from Noam Chomsky and being feted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.

    Krauthammer does indeed rank highly among today's conservative commentariat insomuch as that he does not seem to use the term "Democrat Party" and has so far refrained from screaming or crying on television. And many of his arguments in opposition to liberalism are quite cogent, which is certainly a fine thing for an argument to be.

    Tragically, though, someone appears to have convinced him that he is some sort of expert on foreign policy and military affairs. When NATO sought to derail another potential Balkan genocide by way of its 1999 air bombing campaign against Serbia, Krauthammer denounced the move as mere wide-eyed liberal amateurism on the part of Clinton <http://www.srpska-mreza.com/Kosovo/hoax/articles/WP-Krauthammer.html> , arguing that air strikes would be insufficient to force Milosevic out of Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he tried to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling JimLehrer , "we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground." But the wacky columnist leaves out the rest of Clark's answer in which the general explains <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/jan-june99/clark_3-29.html> that "the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic" and that the purpose of the air campaign was to make him do just that. For good measure,Krauthammer also criticizes Clinton for playing golf in the midst of conflict ("The stresses of war, no doubt"); he appears to have changed his mind on the propriety of such things around 2002 or so.

    Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer was still ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in '99 that NATO involvement "would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries." When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2001/03/30/two_ways_to_look_at_war> "the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion," making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a "quagmire." The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the IMF and the World Bank; Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO and the EU.

    Like many others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer bumbled into our two more recent military adventures in a haze of amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. He ridiculed <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2003/04/04/perspective_on_the_duration_of_war>  New York Times contributor Johnny Apple for writing an article to the effect that Afghanistan may develop into a "quagmire" <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/31/international/31ASSE.html>  and another one in which Apple proposed that coalition forces might have to contend with guerrilla fighters in Iraq <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/31/international/31ASSE.html> . Krauthammer himself hailed the Iraq conflict <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2003/04/10/gulf_war_ii_is_first_of_its_kind> as "the Three Week War;" when those allegedly improbable guerrillas did show up and U.S. reconstruction efforts were revealed to have been implemented largely by dipshit Liberty University grads, Krauthammer responded with studied sarcasm. "Every pundit, every ex-official and, of course, every Democrat knows exactly how it should have been done," he wrote <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2003/10/03/everyones_an_expert> , before going on to explain how it should have been done. He concludes the 2003 column with the suggestion that if "in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated." Two years later, Krauthammer followed up by admitting to his failures and acknowledging the predictive superiority of his opponents. Just kidding. Instead, he denounced <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2006/04/21/i-know-better_generals_get_on_the_slippery_slope> retired military figures like John Batiste as the "I-know-better generals" for second-guessing Rumsfeld, whom he continued to support after even William Kristol had begun calling for the defence secretary's resignation. Later, when the surge was proposed, Krauthammer came out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2007/01/19/maliki_doesnt_deserve_a_surge> that it "will fail" due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki government; today, he deems the strategy to have been a success. Thus it is that this most inexplicably respected of conservative commentators may be the only pundit in the country to have been wrong about every major U.S. foreign policy question of the last decade.

   Krauthammer hasn't fared much better in the realm of domestic predictions. In his aforementioned column on Obama - the one in which he praises the senator's blackness <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2006/10/27/barack_obamas_future> , not the one in which he attacks everyone else for doing the same - our columnist explains that, should he run, "he will not win. The reason is 9/11." In the meantime, he says, the White House will probably go to a Republican - "say, 9/11 veteran Rudy Giuliani."Krauthammer  also warns <http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2006/08/11/lamonts_victory_will_hurt_democrats_in_the_long_run> that the "reflexive anti-war sentiments" of the left "will prove disastrous for the Democrats in the long run - the long run beginning as early as November '08."

    Though well up to speed on his silly predictions quota, Krauthammer would still be in danger of losing his parking spot at The Weekly Standard if he failed to turn out the occasional bit of goofy hypocrisy as well. In the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, our columnist appeared on Fox News to point out the shooter's inevitable connection to Islam <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/04/special_report_roundtable_apri_22.html> :

Krauthammer: And he did leave the return address 'Ismail Ax.' 'Ismail Ax.' I suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.

Brit Hume: Which was, "My name is Ismael."

    Close enough, Brit.  But in a column that appeared two days later <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902543.html> , Krauthammer denounced "the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage" and called for taste in the aftermath of tragedy. "Perhaps in the spirit of Obama's much-heralded post-ideological politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder." He had, after all, gotten his own licks in already.

    So, there you go. That's Charles Krauthammer.


On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:
Terrific, thanks.



On 7/16/09 2:07 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com <http://barriticus@gmail.com> > wrote:

Of course; I'll get the piece to you by the end of the week.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com <http://Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> > wrote:
Hey Barrett,

I think this sounds great. Could we perhaps run this in place of the ID piece, which in the end just doesn’t seem quite right for us?

Best,
Mike



On 7/14/09 1:30 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com> > wrote:

Would you be interested in a piece on Charles Krauthammer, akin to the Thomas Friedman piece? He's being hailed now as sort of the most "serious" of the neoconservatives:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2009/03/krauthammer-the.html

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=5B4E15F8-18FE-70B2-A8818586DFA6E1BA

I've dug up tons of great stuff on him going back to 2001. Let me know if you're interested.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 2:09 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com> > wrote:
Groovy. I've got a couple little tweaks I want to make as well, so send me your version when you're ready and I'll send it back to you with changes in bold for your approval. You guys really riled up the squares with that Palin piece, eh?


Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com <http://Michael_Hogan@condenast.com>  <http://Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> > wrote:
Barrett,

This is terrific. Going to make a few tweaks and then send you an edit. We’re in the midst of unfurling our new issue, so perhaps we could run this next week?

Best,
Mike



On 6/25/09 11:08 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com> > wrote:

Michael-

Let me know if this version works.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

Back in the dark days before ubiquitous internet, disinformation was sustainable. When you were told that Marilyn Manson is actually Paul from The Wonder Years, it would have been difficult to prove otherwise; one would have had to find someone's old VHS tape on which they'd recorded one of the episodes, check the credits to figure out what that actor's name was, and then find someone's copy of Antichrist Superstar and look for the same name on the liner notes. And it was unlikely that you would find old Wonder Years episodes and Marilyn Manson albums in the same place. It was easier to just half-believe that Paul was Marilyn Manson.

   Life is different now, if less interesting. Consider William Dembski, the mathematician and theologian who rose to the top of the nascent intelligent design pack in the late '90s after claiming to have proven that certain aspects of biology can be attributable only to the intervention of one or more intelligent entities. As for who or what those entities might be, Dembski is coy when addressing a potentially secular audience, claiming that there "are many possibilities." Among these possibilities, we may determine, is that Dembski is lying; in a 1999 interview with the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski stated unambiguously <http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI001_1.html> that "[i]ntelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." With ID being increasingly under attack as theology clothed in science, Dembski has since been more hesitant in giving due credit to either John or the Logos. 

    Bits of information are no longer compartmentalized like so many scattered VHS tapes and gothic rock album liner notes, which is why Dembski and company can't get away with trying to portray ID as a scientific theory with no religious intent while having already admitted that same religious intent to sympathetic Biblical literalists. But that crowd doesn't seem to understand this fundamental aspect of the internet, that Google waits in watch of dishonesty. And thus it is that Dembski's blog Uncommon Descent is among the most interesting things that the internet has to offer. More importantly, it provides us with a sense of how the leaders of the ID movement would run things if they were ever to run anything other than a blog.

    Dembski began blogging in 2005, perhaps as a means of procrastination; 2005 was also the last year in which he and his movement colleagues bothered to put out a new issue of their own scientific journal <http://www.iscid.org/> , although their lack of output hasn't stopped them from criticizing mainstream journals for declining to publish their work, non-existent though it may be. Some choice moments in the years since:

* In conjunction with his friends at the pro-ID Discovery Institute, Dembski decided to commission a Flash animation ridiculing Judge John Jones <http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/the-voice-in-the-judge-jones-school-of-law/> , the Bush-appointed churchgoer who, despite being a Bush-appointed churchgoer, ruled in the 2005 Dover Trial (known more formerly as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and even more formally as something longer and more formal) that intelligent design could not be taught in public school science classes. The animation consisted of Judge Jones represented as a puppet with his strings being held by various proponents of evolution; aside from being depicted as unusually flatulent, poor Judge Jones was also shown to be reading aloud from his court opinion in a high-pitched voice (Dembski's, it turned out, but sped up to make it sound sillier). The point of all of this, as The Discovery Institute explained <http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1186> , was that Jones had supposedly cribbed some 90 percent of his decision from findings presented by the ACLU, and that this was a very unusual and terrible thing for Jones to have done. On the contrary, judges commonly incorporate the findings of the winning party into their final opinion, either in whole or in part, and Jones' own written opinion actually incorporated far less than 90 percent of the findings in question. For his part, Dembski agreed to reduce the number of fart noises in the animation if Jones would agree to contribute his own voice <http://www.uncommondescent.com/education/flatulence-removed-from-the-judge-jones-school-of-law/> . Jones does not appear to have accepted the offer.

* One of Dembski's hand-picked blog co-moderators, Dave Springer, once received an e-mail to the effect that the ACLU was about to sue the Marine Corps in order to stop Marines from praying; outraged, Springer posted it on his blog in order that his readers could join him in being affronted <http://www.uncommondescent.com/religion/off-topic-from-a-dear-friend-of-mine/> . After all, the e-mail had told him to. "Please send this to people you know so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is Getting [sic] in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America," the bright-red text exhorted, above pictures of praying Marines. "Right on!" Dembski added in the comments. It was then pointed out by other readers that the e-mail was a three-year-old hoax; the ACLU spokesperson named therein did not actually exist, and neither did the ACLU's complaint. Springer was unfazed by the revelation. "To everyone who’s pointed out that the ACLU story is a fabrication according to snopes.com <http://snopes.com>  <http://snopes.com>  <http://snopes.com>  <http://snopes.com>  - that’s hardly the point," he explained. "The pictures of Marines praying are real." Dembski himself had no further comment.



* Dembski has spent much time and energy pointing out that Charles Darwin made several racist statements back in the 19th century, even going so far as to call for a boycott of the British ten-pound note <http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/no-thanks-ill-take-two-fivers-dumping-darwin-from-british-currency/> due to Darwin's picture being displayed thereupon. Incidentally, Dembski has spent most of the past decade working at universities within the fold of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in the 19th century for the sole purpose of defending slavery.

* Springer, the aforementioned aficionado of e-mail forwards, once noted <http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/who-says-darwinists-dont-make-predictions/#comment-144711> that he stopped reading an article by a critic of intelligent design because it contained a cartoon depicting the famous Black Knight routine from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Anyone who needs to resort to Monty Python in a scientific argument can be safely ignored as not having any legs to stand on," he announced. Springer can be forgiven for not being aware that Dembski himself has referenced Monty Python <http://www.metanexus.net/Magazine/tabid/68/id/2667/Default.aspx>  in the context of a scientific argument more than once <http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/evolutionary-theory-and-monty-pythons-black-knight/> . Somewhat more inexplicable is that Springer himself has done the exact same thing <http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/glen-davidson-candidate-for-stupid-question-of-the-year/#comment-44558> , making reference to the very same Monty Python routine and doing so in the very same context as did the article he was criticizing - twice <http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-problem-of-improvable-design/#comment-8304> . I mean, come on.

* Upon being told that University of Texas Professor Eric Pianka had given a speech in which he'd supposedly asserted that the world would be better off if most of humanity was killed via a global contagion, Dembski announced on his blog <http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/eric-pianka-time-for-an-interview-with-the-department-of-homeland-security/> that he had just reported Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security out of concern that the elderly biologist was planning to somehow contribute to the destruction of humanity. The FBI interviewed Pianka but took no further action, having perhaps determined that the recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award was not actually planning on killing off the majority of the world's population.


* Seriously, it was the exact same Monty Python routine.

    Next September will bring the release of The End of Christianity, William Dembski's latest work in defense of religion and in opposition to atheism. Among other things, he'll be taking on Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great. If you happen to spot Hitchens having a drink, it will almost certainly be out of sheer terror.

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com> > wrote:
Howdy-

Sure, no problem. I'll send you a simpler version tomorrow.


Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com <http://Michael_Hogan@condenast.com>  <http://Michael_Hogan@condenast.com>  <http://Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> > wrote:
Hey Barrett,

I got it, and it’s interesting enough, but it’s awfully long and discursive. I’m wondering if there’s some webbier, chartier way to present the information?

Best,
Mike


On 6/12/09 12:19 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com>  <http://barriticus@gmail.com> > wrote:

Howdy-

Let me know if you received the intelligent design piece earlier this week when you get a moment, por favor.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302