Friday Morning

After a conversation with my friend Mary yesterday, I called Nancy Pelosi's office this morning and asked why impeachment was off the table. The staffer's explanation was exactly as I suspected--that the Speaker does not want the party consumed by the impeachment process--and I completely understand that. I am not sure she is wrong. I really think the Vice President has broken numerous laws and committed numerous impeachable offenses and by all rights should be impeached. But running through the scenario, I can see it as a huge political risk, and the Speaker is looking at possibly expanding the Democratic lead in 08 in both houses.

It also strikes me as an oddity that the Clinton impeachment has helped the Republicans. The very idea that we can't impeach Bush or Cheney seems due to the clear memory of the ridiculous recent impeachment. So, even though Bush and Cheney have most likely committed far worse offenses than Clinton, they will not be impeached because we impeached Clinton for a blow job. Sigh.

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Mary also alerted me to this Salon piece on the Creation Museum. Interesting stuff, including the assertion that the great flood (of Noah) is the key to the entire creationist explanation. That explains the dispersal of fossils; the existence of the Grand Canyon (ignoring tremendous geological evidence to the contrary, of course); and the existence of other cultures, which occurred after the flood. (I guess that is where China and North American cultures arise? Talk about hard to buy--that all of these cultures developed such extensive dwellings and foodways and cultural systems in only a few hundred years--or anthropology and archeology are all wrong on that too. I guess archeology is only right when they discover something mentioned in the Bible.) Not surprising, I guess, is that Ken Ham essentially explains all evil in the world to a belief that the earth is millions of years old:

A montage slide show of fetuses, starving kids, swastikas, tourniquet-bound arms ready for the needle bombard the wall in a room with a soundtrack of blaring sirens, boots marching in unison, and crying kids. In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world's problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief "is at the root of modern evil."

Ancient evil, I guess, doesn't exist since there is no real antiquity.

Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. "I don't care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon," he tells me. "It's not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin's theory has no God. It can't be right. I don't know if this story is truer than Darwin's theory, but I do know it's better."

Wow. Truth is really not the point. Facts are not relevant. What is important is what you believe.

Isn't that exactly how Bush operates?