Try, if you can, to wrap your head around the fact that Scott over at PowerTools (Time's Blog of the Year, remember?) thinks that this is just a terrific smackdown:
Why, for two distinct groups of Americans, has it become a matter of conviction held with religious intensity that there cannot have been any relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq?
I'm not sure it's physically possible to be any dumber than that. I'm not aware of any responsible critic of the Iraq war taking the position that there "cannot" have been any Saddam/al-Qaida relationship. How moronic would that be? Of course there could have been a relationship. It's always possible, in the same pedantic, technical sense that it's possible that George Bush and Dick Cheney are underground al-Qaida members, bent on destroying the United States through the enactment of stunningly self-destructive economic and military policies.
OK, that last part just creeped me out a bit, but that's not the point here.
The point is that no one is making the claim that gets Scott so excited. Rather, the claim is that there is no conclusive evidence that there was such a relationship, which is a totally different stance entirely.
Sadly, this distinction is utterly lost on the mentally disadvantaged who, when you say something like "You can't prove a connection between Saddam and al-Qaida," think it's just the wickedest of comebacks to respond, "Oh, yeah? Well ... well ... you can't prove there wasn't! So there!"
These are, naturally and for the most part, the same imbeciles who, when you say, "You can't prove God exists," snap back, "Yeah, well, you can't prove he doesn't!" Along those lines, I have no actual evidence that Bill O'Reilly has had carnal relations with livestock but, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure he can't prove that he hasn't. Stalemate.
And this is what passes for deep thought in Wankerville. Is that frightening or what?
4 comments:
this goes back to the notion that Saddam Hussien was supposed to prove he didn't have wmd. How the fuck do you prove you don't have something? You can't really disprove the existence of God to an irrational fundementalist, he'll just fall back on idiotic arguments about how god made the dinosaurs remains to fool the unfaithful and that the lack of any scientific proof is god testing the faithful.
"...he'll just fall back on idiotic arguments about how god made the dinosaurs remains to fool the unfaithful and that the lack of any scientific proof is god testing the faithful."
Yikes. I've heard them say that dinosaurs didn't exist and the remains were not what scientists think they are, but I've never known one to go so far as to say they were planted by god. That's a new one. Freaky.
And these people think they're qualified to debate stem cell research, carbon dating and the origins of life?
Shouldn't they be too busy trying to figure out how to avoid falling off of the edge of the earth to go head to head with the scientific community?
Actually, the "God planted dinosaur remains" argument is an old saw used by young-earth creationists to explain away the obvious issues with carbon data and geological strata that their theology encounters when it runs into rational facts.
I first encountered that in the 1980's when I worked with a young-earther who tried to persuade me of their beliefs.
They just so desperately WANT there to have been a connection, because then the Iraq war would then be justifiable. Its pitiful.
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