The Bay of Fundie is proud to announce a new feature: Know Your Foe. KYF will profile noteworthy fundies and others who threaten our way of life. To quote the Shrub, “They hate us, because of our freedom.” There’s nothing a fundie enjoys more than curtailing somebody else’s freedom. Since pleasure is mostly forbidden among fundies, they have to get their fun wherever they can.

I am starting with Dr. Laura Schlessinger. This may seem an odd choice. She is not directly threatening our liberties, because she is not a politician or religious leader. She has a radio program (thankfully, her ratings have declined significantly since her heyday), where she spews out her own special brand of hate. I picked her first, because I came across the famous Letter to Dr. Laura that was making the rounds on the Internet a couple of years ago.

Know Your Foe lives in the non-blog portion of this website, because this will keep it at the top level of the menu, easily accessible in the future. I hope to eventually build out the feature to include a lot of the other right-wing nutjobs.

Know Your Foe differs from Kook Watch, which is devoted to quick links about problem people. Some of those kooks might eventually graduate from Kook Watch to full-fledged Foes with their very own exposé page. What an honor!

In the meantime, check out the Letter to Dr. Laura, then read her very own place of honor in Know Your Foe.

Further proof for my Feb. 21st article “Politics Creeps In” (see article below). Bruce Bartlett doesn’t drink Bush’s Kool-Aid!

Republican economist Bruce Bartlett (Wikipedia biography, Fresh Air interview) has impressive conservative credentials. He worked in the administrations of both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; was one of the architects of Reagan’s 1981 tax cut; and has worked at the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). He’s certainly qualified to know a conservative when he sees one.

He has written the book Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy which got him fired from the NCPA.

Whether you believe in Freudian slips or mere coincidence, I think Bartlett’s recent appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart was quite telling:

Bruce Bartlett: I think conservatives would like to believe that they at least make the trains run on time.

Jon Stewart: So they follow Mussolini’s theory on government?

Bartlett: I realized that was not a good thing to say as the words were coming out of my mouth!

A Jehovah’s Witness once said to me “God, exists, and I can prove it!”

Needless, to say, I was eager to hear this proof. After all, this is something that has been debated for thousands of years. Just think! He was about to reveal to me one of the greatest secrets of the Universe!

I decried “I am not worthy!” and prostrated myself at his feet. I then groveled, “But if you could see fit to enlighten one so lowly, I would remain forever your humble servant!”

Actually, I think I just said “Oh yeah?”

Now pay attention. Here is the exact proof of God’s existence that this JW gave me: “Just look around!”

I looked around, but there was no shimmering light, no harp music, no Gabriel’s trumpet, no sense of rapture, no one being Left Behind (except our science students in the public schools), and no burning Bush (except for the remnants of the effigy I made earlier). In short, there was no proof.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Everything!” he said. “The entire Universe! It could only have been created by God!”

The conversation went downhill from there.

Logic

Let’s follow the argument:

A created B.
We know B exists.
Therefore, A must exist.

What kind of crappy logic is that? The entire thing rests on “A created B.” They start out with an unproven assertion, and then they use the conclusion to prove the assertion!

Try this:

Unicorns drive Studebakers.
We know Studebakers exist.
Therefore, fundies have brains.

See? When you plug different words into the same logic, the fallacy is obvious!

The Koran

The History Channel’s Decoding the Past had a recent episode on the Koran. The program stated that many Muslims believe that the language in the Koran is so perfect that it must be evidence of God’s existence. How could an illiterate man (Muhammad) in the middle of nowhere produce such a document?

Camel dung!

“Illiterate” doesn’t mean “stupid”! The guy may have been very eloquent; he just didn’t know how to write.

What is more of a stretch is believing that William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays that bear his name. He was allegedly functionally illiterate. Yet these are the greatest literary works in the English language. They contain some of the most magnificent writing of all time.

Hamlet could have only been written by God!

William Shakespeare was the messiah!

(Or maybe Shakespeare wasn’t the retard that some people claim. Or maybe the statement “Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays” is more credible than the foundation of the world’s second-largest religion.)