Associated Press
Santorum points to his elusive thinking cap.
Rick Santorum made the transition yesterday from theology, pre-natal care, and WWII, to rhetoric that's arguably even more ridiculous: accusing his opponents of being "anti-science."
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum charged on Monday that President Barack Obama and Democrats were "anti-science" because they refused to exploit the Earth's natural resources to the limits of technology. [...]
"It's so funny that this party that criticizes the right for being anti-science, but when it comes to the management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones!" the candidate declared. "We're the ones who stand for science and technology and using the resources we have to make sure we have a quality of life in this country and maintain a good and stable environment."
Santorum added that there was "obviously a role for government to play" in environmental regulation, but it was best left to state and local government.
"Freedom isn't to do whatever you want to do, it's to do what you ought to do," he opined.
Oh my.
First, that's an odd definition of "freedom." Second, leaving environmental regulations to state and local governments is, at a fundamental level, absurd -- air pollution in one state affects how people breathe in another; waste dumped in rivers, lakes, and oceans does not simply stay near the state of origin. This is one of those classic "why we have a federal government" areas of public policy.
But it's the notion that Rick Santorum feels comfortable labeling others "anti-science" that truly rankles. As the Raw Story report noted, this is the same former senator who crusaded against potentially life-saving stem-cell research and fought to require science teachers to include religious instruction in their lesson plans.
Indeed, while Santorum seems offended that the left "criticizes the right for being anti-science," reality is stubborn.
The Republican hostility for science, scientists, the scientific method, scientific inquiry, and empirical research in general has already been solidified as part and parcel of the party’s identity. The GOP mainstream rejects scientific evidence on everything from global warming to stem-cell research to evolutionary biology to sex-ed — in part because they find reality inconvenient, and in part because, as David Brooks put it, many Republicans simply “do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.”
In the Bush/Cheney era, there was an effective “war on science,” in which scientific research was either rejected or manipulated to suit political ends. The integrity of the scientific process itself came under attack, to the delight of the party and its base.
In the Obama era, this has only intensified. As Chris Mooney explained very well a while back, “The science-based community once was split between Democrats and Republicans — but not anymore.”
Increasingly, the parties are divided over expertise — with much more of it residing among liberals and Democrats, and with liberals and Democrats much more aligned with the views of scientists and scholars. More fundamentally, the parties are increasingly divided over reality itself….
The expertise gap itself is becoming dramatic. In one of the most comprehensive surveys of American professors, sociologists Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons of George Mason found that 51 percent described themselves as Democrats, and 35.3 percent described themselves as independents — with the bulk of those independents distinctly Democrat-leaning, rather than straddling the center. Just 13.7 percent were Republicans. Academia has long been a liberal bastion, but it hasn’t always been this lopsided….
The Democratic Party has thus become the chosen party of what you might call “empirical professionals” and Americans with advanced degrees…. In recent decades, the Republican Party’s rightward shift alienated many academics, scientists, and intellectuals.
Republican strategist John Weaver warned last year, "We're not going to win a national election if we become the anti-science party." With Santorum leading the way, it may already be too late.
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Rick Santorum, and his fellow travelers, are the faces and voices of the American Taliban.
"You have the freedom to do exactly what we tell you to do!"
I'm a Jesuit trained Catholic AND scientist and I'm sick to death of how Santorum and his ilk have perverted both Christianity AND science in their quest to impose sharia-esque sovereignty and full spectrum dominance over our lives. And I mean from "conception of our own perception" all the way to the grave.
Please see my article on this:
"RICK SANTORUM'S 'SLY LIES & SOCIOPATHIC POLITICAL THEOLOGY'"
Some people need religion because this is their only connection with the world.
The rest need religion because it adds value to their life.
Santorum has ceased all attempts to appear as if he belongs in the latter group.
You couldn't make this stuff up! These guys should be fantasy writers--oh they are.
For Rick Santorum to be calling President Obama or anyone else "anti science" is stunning.
This is not something to take lightly. The religious right have been working for years to frame this argument and it has now reached a fevered pitch. Do not think that this man could not win. With the money backing and the fact that ads run on TV do not have to be true or factual, the GOP could buy this election. This is scary, not funny.
Vote.
Yes, agreed! Every time I hear a fellow liberal chortling with glee over the prospect of someone like Santorum (or Palin, or Herman Cain, etc.) getting the GOP nomination, I think back to my reaction on seeing George W Bush running for president. I thought: there's no way this clown could possibly get elected! And, sad to say, we know how that turned out.
It's not that the reich is against "science" per say as much as they are against LEARNING, period. Independently thing minds are so much harder to be lead and the low-information voting base is so much more pliant in voting against their own (& our) best economic interests!!
That's the theology vs. science in a nut-shell. Theology is something that is inherently exclusive and inherently 'always-right'. Science is inherently always asking questions and never afraid to be wrong.
He is the perfect manifestation of all of the pathologies of the religious right. Newt appealed to their desire for red meat rhetoric against "others." Rick goes much much deeper than that.
I disagree. They are both very shallow in my opinion.
When did we STOP being the UNITED STATES of America? There are some issues that transcend state politics and become 'good for all'. Anti-science indeed. Does Santorum and his ilk even REALIZE that air and ground water don't stop at state lines?
"Freedom isn't to do whatever you want to do, it's to do what you ought to do."**
--Rick Santorum
So in Froth's tiny little brain, "Freedom" means you are free to do what you are told to do by your betters. (Must. Not. Invoke. Germany, USSR, North Korea et al ...)
** Not applicable to corporations, who as persons are always free to do literally whatever they feel is in their best interests and don't need the government horning in, thank you very much.
The beatings will not stop until morale improves.
- Capt. Bligh
There is only one "science" book needed, and it tells us that God made everything in less than a week, -and gave us dominion over it.
So, sit down, and shut up.
Bill Nye says...
To want to use a book of fairy tales as a science manual has to be the most idiotic idea that I have ever read!It's almost as stupid as believing in American truth and justice!Myles.
Wow, shades of religion class. I haven't heard that line in years.
To quote H L Mencken - "In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."
He should visit China (remember the "air" at the Olympics) and some other industrialized countries where they don't much care about the environment and don't have all those pesky regulations.
Hey Ricky ; Last time I checked people kind of like fresh air and clean water. With the rapture coming (or do you Catholics believe in that) I guess it doesn't matter.
Yes, I vote for Rick Santorum....to live there for a while to prove his point.
I think sweater vests should be outlawed - watching Ricky wear them, they are definitely a form of birth control.
Ha, well-played!
I think I'm gonna barf
For you, Nell: (FF to 1:45)
http://www.joblo.com/video/player.php?video=fargo-barf
Dear Mr. Benen,
First of all, Wow.
Second, is there any inkling of a chance that Mr. Santorum is and art project, too?
It seems to me that Mr. Santorum is willing to take his marching orders from Rome. Wasn't that a fear with another Catholic presidential candidate who went on to become president and that fear was rendered unfounded? I just wonder what big, important event is going on in the world that we aren't supposed to see when these candidates monopolize the dialogue with this nonsense. This has to be a diversion of sorts. What is over there that they don't want us to look at? An improving economy? A record of accomplishment? What is it? Jobs, jobs, jo.....Oh! Wait! Must. Discuss. Anti-Women. Stuff. Must. Paint. Climate Scientists as Evil. Must. Defend. Catholic. Teachings. Even. If. We. Never. Cared. About. Them. Before. Look away from the light. Don't let anyone look into the light.
Respectfully submitted,
MG
An issues diversion? Most certainly.
But it's also quite possible Santorum feels he has been "called" to monopolize on any politically plateaued opportunity he finds himself in to "witness" to the masses for what he sees as a preparation for a theological transition of power over our nation and Her citizens. It's really anyone's guess at this point. Care to play?
It is the state of our states we should worry about.
Maybe he's taking his marching orders from the Pope, but only from the afterlife, since the positions he espouses went out with the Renaissance even with the Catholic Church. Maybe from the Borgia pope?
Thanks to jjm for making this point. A longer and more detailed discussion of how Little Ricky's 'altar boy Catholicism' is quite selective, and how many teachings of the Bishops -- teachings, btw, that most of us agree with -- Little Ricky rejects can be found in <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/154122/10_catholic_teachings_conservatives_reject_while_obsessing_about_birth_control?page=entire">Juan Cole's Alternet Article</a> only <i>please</i> read the whole thing. After the list is one of the more eloquent defenses not just of religious pluralism, but of the benefits that religious groups can provide to our political discourse -- even when they are wrong.
(I am, btw, an atheist, specifically an atheist who came from a Catholic upbringing, and have been for almost 50 years. But i was a rarity, someone who discovered he was an atheist first, and then left the Church because of that, and not because of some repulsive opinion, restriction, or hypocrisy from some part of the -- wider than realized -- Catholic spectrum. I still find myself with more respect for certain Catholic teachings than I have for their Protestant counterparts -- including Catholicism's rejection of creationism and Biblical literalism -- true even when I was a member -- its insistence that 'good works count towards one's salvation' which was the original point which caused the Reformation, and its acceptance that doubt is natural, not sinful -- which comes from the same place, since if faith is the only means to salvation, doubt is 'the first step to hell.')
Two points. One minor and technical, how the ... do you use HTML here. I sued the format I was accustomed to, should I be using brackets or what?
Much more importantly, I want to 'pivot' on my last comment to make a generalized comment, one that is relevant to relatively few commenters here -- more when Steve was at WM -- but which I still see occasionally, and which i find much more common in the comments sections of other, major Liberal blogs -- in general I prefer 'liberal' to 'progressive' but use them interchangably.
This is the way some stories seem to give some of the commenters the chance to 'unleash their inner homophobe' or 'inner anti-Catholicism' or even their 'inner misogynist.' When a Republican is 'outed' or 'caught' we start out insisting we are only talking about his hypocrisy -- but then the sniggering jokes start, jokes that are about the man's gayness and not about his pathetic attempts to deny it, jokes that continue on sometimes for years after the man has left public life. (And jokes he'd write protest letters about if they were made by a Limbaugh about a gay Democrat -- even one who had always been out.)
And no mention of Catholicism seems complete without some reference to the pedophile scandal -- and yes, I've made them myself. But we never make jokes when -- as has happened -- rabbis are accused of the same thing, or Protestant ministers, or if the 'offense' charged involves heterosexuality and consenting adults -- even though, for a priest either is equally sinful.
And -- maybe the worst example I've seen, and I won't name the 'big-name blog' because the writers there -- unlike the commenters -- are almost all worth reading -- involved a story about one of the Fox female idiots. (It wasn't Megyn, still trying to find the exact piece so I can use it if challenged, but would rather not.) There were somewhere between 50-100 comments about it, and nearly half used some form of vile, misogynist term for the reporter, and there was not one post in protest -- even if I had found the piece, many of the terms could not be used here.
Can we do a little 'self-policing' and tell our friends that bigoted jackassery is best left to the Republicans, who have had longer practice and do it better?
The post goes back to January 12th, and refers to Monica Crowley. (And my apology for staying so off topic, but this has been festering for so long...) I suppose 'airhead' and 'bimbo' have become acceptable. I've even seen 'airhead' used (rarely) for penis-equipped human beings. "Ignorant bleach blonde' is at least not profane. And 'bint' is, afaik, so archaic, I'm the only one who recognized it. The gentleman -- I presume I have his genetalia correct -- who used the most common female-directed 4-letter word had the 'decency' to replace the middle letters with dashes. (And 'harridan' another word with genetalia included, was used for Eleanor Clift, not Crowley.)
Maybe my fellow feminists -- a word with NO genetalia attached -- might rejoice that several commenters explained we should dismiss her comments because she was a 'non-orgasmic prune' -- someone else getting what female feminists have heard for years. (Only one supposedly female commenter used a variant of 'she just needs to get...' but it was implied by others. And why should we be annoyed at a female being accused of getting her job by sleeping her way to it? The two are contradictory, but they were said by different people)
Some of the other terms are ones I won't challenge Rachel's editors on. But one last comment. "[FOX] proudly hires the most ignorant, ugly whores right off the street."
I can accept the statements, I guess, and even that they weren't marked offensive and removed or buried except for 'special request.' But that not one person challenged them, that was the worst.
To steal a line from Mythbusters to summarize the GOP, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"
Wikipedia is being kept very busy adding definitions for so many things modified by the GOP.
You call it loud but the human crowd doesn't mean sh*t to a tree"
Grace Slick 1967
Hey Rick go look at the latest Hubble shots .
It will give you a timeline perspective
The orbiting space telescope collected light that has been streaking through space for more than 13 billion years and started its journey when the universe was only 5 percent of its present age, believed to be about 13.7 billion years.
Earth will be here long after humans have run their course.
They are but a nanosecond of existence in the big picture.
Santorum is just throwing everything he can against the wall and hoping enough sticks for him to win.
He has also said that Obama's healthcare policy discourages marriage and hurts families.
WOW, this man's comments leave me breathless! The White House must be loving it, but the GOP wise men must be freaking out!
Obama should be doing everything he can to make sure Santorum is the Republican candidate. If I were a Dem strategist, I would be salivating over a Santorum candidacy. He will frighten more than the GOP wise men; he will scare the independent voters and that will carry Obama and the Dems in swing districts in the House, swing states and possibly bring a few upsets in the Senate. If enough independents come out to vote, this will affect many races even in state elections.
President Barack Obama and Democrats were "anti-science" because they refused to exploit the Earth's natural resources to the limits of technology
Santorum is for fetal stem cell research, human cloning, and man-animal hybrids now?
Inbreeding (hybridization?) of business and religious conservatism is confusing.
Sighs. For the last time people every state in the Union is broke by design. Your state does not earn money like a business. You cannot just put burden after burden on your state and expect the state to maintain itself unless you want your state and local taxes to go through the roof. That's OK if you do- especially if you're in a low population state like Wyoming where there's very few people to spread the burden of taxation across- but you have to realize what it is that you're asking for. States do not have never ending resources. People seem to be able to recognize that our federal government doesn't have unending money, but then they simply explain it away by saying 'well let's shift burden to the state governments!' as if that's any better. Oh and just FYI- the majority of regulations out there imposed on states revolve around funding. Your state actually has the ability to opt out of the majority of regulations it's complicit in. So why isn't your state cutting all those burdensome regulations that it isn't obligated to follow anyways? Because your state knows that it is broke and knows that it needs that federal money in order to function. No compliance =/= federal loan. And since we would agree to this practice in the private sector (I.E. that the lender gets to set the terms of agreement) there should be no complaint that these regulatory rules exist.
Santorum criticized the left for 'saying freedom to worship' instead of ' freedom of religion'. I thought the point was to be in touch with God as you see him. It has never been that God was the problem. The problem is the claims of the self-righteous and their need to push their beliefs on everyone else. A scientifically ignorant population is easier to lead or cow, but I guess we should question if Santorum is one of these ignorant people as well. Was he indoctrinated in ignorance, or did he decide to sacrifice his brain cells after the fact? There must be some sort of comfort in being so certain of everything.
If you say freedom of worship then you hate God. Just like if you wish someone Happy Holidays.
And if you pray to a God different from their God then you hate the real God.
This is an ancient divide. Santorum is not interested in what the world tells us. He is interested in what inspiration tells us.
Santorum would like the NeoCon's inspiration on Iraq to have been correct- that Iraq had WMD. Santourm believed that, and kept stating it even after the military had declared that the only thing found were a few hundred old shells from the Iran-Iraq war used for chemical weapons. An enterprising reporter really ought to ask Santorum if America found WMD in Iraq, because as recently as 2006, he was loudly proclaiming the continued fantasy that we had, despite his awareness of the monumental evidence to the contrary.
Santorum is at war with reality, and this is a spiritual war. He doesn't like inconvenient facts. He does not believe that God can speak to him through facts. As far as he is concerned, the world is fallen, therefore the evil one uses facts to tell lies to mankind. If this sounds nutty then you are starting to get a handle on where Santorum is coming from. Ok. Santorum wants to talk theology. Ok let's talk theology. This point of view of Santorum's? It pretty much lost out in the middle ages. It was the confrontation between the Augustinians and the Aristotelians.
Those nasty old Arabs in the middle ages had a great deal of respect for wisdom from other cultures and had carefully kept all the works of Aristotle which presented the basis of the idea that what the senses told us about the world mattered. That we could reason from facts and learn things about the world. To our modern eyes, we would think that theologians would be against this idea, and sure enough most were, because the dominant view was based on the ideas of St. Augustine. History of Science commentator James Burke popularized this turning point in his PBS series "The Day the Universe Changed". So when barbarian louts conquered the Moorish cities of Spain they called in the monks because there were these immense libraries with piles and piles of books with stuff that everyone thought was lost. Anyway, the theological reason the Aristotelians were motivated spiritually was the proposition that by studying God's creation, we could better know the Creator better. The biblical proposition was that you know people not so much by what they say but by their fruits. By looking at God's works, we could better know him. Other cultures such as those of the Chinese and Egyptians knew about this way of studying the world and discovered some useful things this way. But in the west, it was pursued with religious zeal.
Anyway, Santorum doesn't have this attitude towards facts. If there are huge bodies of research that contradict his view, that doesn't matter, because he considers academia as tainted, and mostly the agent of the devil. Seriously. You guys have to listen to his Ave Maria speech.
Because this is what Santorum honestly believes. At least listen to the part where he presents his domino theory about how the devil is subverting American institutions. (Santorum Ave Maria speech- mp3 download)
Science tells us the answer to all these questions is yes.
Ah, now I see it. Thanks for that John.
But, instead of wracking our brains trying to sort this all out I think we could more easily understand Santorum by just dropping some LSD.
I could not get thru. the speech- I couldn't take it anymore. I need to go throw up now.
Brave lad. At least you gave it a shot. But you can see how it ties together his positions on public schools, his hostility to anything from academia and so on.
The main thing is that he doesn't care if any of these positions are political losers. This is an ideological struggle and he sees this as part of a generational battle where he probably gets annihilated on the battlefield.
It's why Rove is peeing his pants.
Brave woman John! :)
Everyone should be peeing their pants. Santorum is an embarrassment to the nation, to Catholics and he's dangerous.
*Tosses a hand towel towards newsblog.* Don't worry about returning it. I've recently stocked up, just in case.
Santorum is the epitome of Orwell's Big Brother. He uses doublethink and Newspeak, claims thoughtcrimes by other people, and uses memory holes. 1984 has finally arrived.
Oops. When I was driving back from dropping the kids off there was this memory that was kind of bubbling up, tapping me on my shoulder- it was a gender pronoun in someone else's post referring to you. Odd how those sorts of things kind of float into consciousness. Anyway, that internal sort of path to truth is the sort of principle is what Augustine talked about. Not a great example because this involved recalling a fact, but the point is that I was not looking for anything at the time. Something in my mind knew there was a contradiction, and was active in resolving it. This activity of "making sense" of the world- of making a consistent model of reality predates human consciousness. It is modelling behavior with survival imperatives driving accuracy in resolving contradictions about what is prey and what is predator. A flicker of a stripe in the bush. It is not a gazelle but a tiger.
In my case I would be dead, because it took me about 40 minutes for me to listen to that tapping on my shoulder.
Anyway, Santorum may be an embarrassment, but Lawrence O'Donnell made the case that liberals should welcome Santorum as a candidate so that we can have a national debate confronting the perspectives that Santorum represents. These guys didn't go away in the middle ages, the Moral Majority did not go away when Falwell left the scene. The Tea Party is just the latest clothes worn by a substantial segment of the population who willfully reject facts. Their reaction to the cognitive dissonance tapping at their shoulder is that the tapping is coming from the evil one- the father of "lies".
What they don't realize is that truth is a mother. And mothers give birth to diverse offspring, not homogeneity. This seems awfully disorganized to males. Getting back to theological underpinnings, this was the problem with the Gnostics in the early church. Their intuition was taking them in a million different diverse directions. There was a book supposedly authored by Magdelene, and others proclaiming Magdelene's position as Jesus's favorite. Other books that pronounced other highly heterodox visions. In Gnostic times, Christianity was highly fragmented, with strange mishmashes of beliefs and new inspirations.
From the theological point of view that Santorum shares, this chaos is the same as that of postmodernism- where people pick and choose what seems correct, or make something else up if nothing off the shelf suits. The early church's "final solution" to all this mother of creativity was to co-opt all symbols of motherhood under the mother Church, and make men dominant of that church, whose head dictated what inspiration was from the devil and which was from the one true God.
Case closed.
That's why Santorum is so disgusted by Obama's definition of sin as "being out of alignment with ones values". For religious pluralism to work, Obama knows he must make a distinction between the absolute truth and what he knows of it. There are those who proclaim certainty about what is in the mind of God and those who refer to the God they know, the sins in the eyes of the God they understand. The latter view admits human error and has humility before god, the former does not. The former makes god into a idol, the latter does not. In Santorum's view, the latter falls into narcissism, self absorption, of doing whatever feels right, that there is no absolute goods- that goods are defined in terms of self. Relativism reigns, and so we become the puppets of the father of lies. Santorum might admit that getting authoritarian about truth is not perfect either (eg. fallibility of the pope), but having truth in the hands of an elite class (the hierarchy of the Church) is better than the alternative.
I said that yesterday. Let the social conservatives get the referendum they have been seeking. The evangelicals have chafed at every president since Carter because they do not feel their interests are being served. If Santorum is soundly defeated, it will end the claims that these Republicans represent the majority of the people who have "small town and real American values." A major defeat would take the wind out of their sails at least on the national level. If the Republicans get walloped, then evangelicals lose some of their influence over the party platform.
Mike I thought you wanted this to be a referendum on big money/ plutocrats/ the 1% in power (Romney).
With Santorum you get the referendum on social issues and the plutocrats. If he wins the nomination, he will try to moderate and talk about the usual taxes, government regulations, etc., because that is where campaign money will come from for his election. If it is Romney, he is likely to stumble over his own tongue. He will lose too.
Since when is the Bible a credible source for science?
Since people decided to take it out of any historical context and read it literally. Fundamentalism = Ignorance