Herman Cain and Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan

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As of last weekend, the Republican presidential primary race lost a contender: Herman Cain dropped out.  It wasn’t his fault, blah blah blah, it was the media, those women’s accusations were just a distraction, blah blah blah, you will be hearing more from him soon.

 

 

Yes, of course, whatever.

 

 

The Ed Show last night had a nice mini-documentary on the Cain mini-campaign: 99.9 seconds of Cain’s various presentations and speeches, mostly in chronological order, including all of his most famous (and infamous) pronouncements.

 

 

I shivered with embarrassment through most of it.  Nine-nine-nine.  Trying to remember what, if anything, he remembered about the Libya conflict.  Saying that, for every woman who’d accused him of harassment, there were a thousand others who hadn’t.  It was a combination of hubris and ignorance which will not be outdone anytime soon.

 

 

But there was one statement that made me boilingly furious, and when I heard it again the other night, I started fuming all over again. 

 

 

I will pull it from a news story, so that I don’t make any transcription mistakes:

 

 

In an Oct. 8 interview, Cain announced his strategy to combat what he called "gotcha" questions, such as who are the leaders of foreign countries. 

 

 

"And when they ask who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I'm going to say, ‘You know, I don't know. Do you know?' And then I'm going to say, ‘How's that going to create one job?'" Cain declared. 

 

 

He later added: “Knowing who is the head of some of these small insignificant states around the world — I don’t think that is something that is critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going.”

 

 

This angers me for so many reasons.  Here are a few:

 

-        Evidently there are candidates who believe that they can win an election by making a virtue of their own abysmal ignorance.  

-        Evidently there are voters who, out of sheer stupidity, would reward this kind of ignorance. 

-        Saying “I don’t know” is fine, if it’s said with humility and with the intention of learning more about the subject at hand, especially if it concerns what you do for a living.  And – here’s the thing – geopolitics are a big part what an American president does for a living.   

-        We will assume that Cain was talking about Uzbekistan.  I can name that tune in four notes, without even Googling: the president’s name is Islam Karimov, and he’s been president of Uzbekistan ever since its independence in the early 1990s.  He is a pretty horrendous tyrant.  Uzbekistan is by no means a small country, and its population outnumbers that of the state of Texas (okay, I had to look that one up, but I’d guessed it had around 30 million people, and I was pretty close).   It, and its various stan-stan neighbors, are rich in resources and control vital strategic locations in Central Asia.  We are not talking about San Marino or Liechtenstein here. 

 

 

(It is interesting to note that, when Hilary Clinton visited Afghanistan a bit later, President Hamid Karzai actually asked her about this.  Word gets around, doesn’t it?)

 

 

Okay.  Cain’s out of the race, so I can stop ranting. 

 

 

But others just as stupid – hmm, could I be thinking of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann? – are still in the running. 

 

 

And they may actually have a chance.

 

 

And that scares the living bejeebers out of me.

 

 

Sometimes Partner and I half-joke about making a run for Canada, if things get bad enough.

 

 

I do believe it may be time to make sure my passport is in order.

 

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Bill O’Reilly versus the tides

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Bad science is nothing new; just ask Galileo.  I will say, however, that the American right wing, with its notoriously anti-intellectual bent, is making Galileo’s persecutors look positively enlightened.

 

 

Michelle Bachmann, to score some political points, threw the (not so old) canard at Rick Perry that vaccines cause autism.  Except that vaccines don’t cause autism.  But Michelle claimed that someone – a mother! - told her that they did.  And that’s that!  Take that, you stupid doctors and scientists!

 

Rick Perry himself, a Christian, prays for stuff.  He prayed for an end to the Texas drought earlier this year; he also prayed for the economy to improve.  (Prayer is so much easier than social action.  And you can always say, if nothing happens, that “God is working it out.”)

 

 

Mitt Romney, who once was almost rational on the subject of the environment and climate change, is creeping toward denialism.  He sort of acknowledges that the climate is changing, but says that we can’t possibly know with certainty whether the human race is responsible for it.  And, without this key piece of information, Mitt says that any attempt toward green living – CO2 reduction, for example – is silly, and a waste of money.  (Hey, Mitt, here’s some information for you: climate change means rising sea levels. Better get your ass back to Utah, where it’s high and dry!)

 

 

But the best, and worst, and most cringeworthy of all, is Bill O’Reilly, on the subject of the earth’s tides.  (This is old news – it dates back to January / February of this year – but he still hasn’t corrected himself, and it’s still a deliciously stupid story.)

 

 

It all began when O’Reilly had a guy named David Silverman on his show.  Silverman represented an organization called the American Atheists Group, which was mounting billboards around the country, some of which called religion a “scam.”  O’Reilly, he of the “war against Christmas” campaign, wanted to sink this guy in the mud.  So he chose an example of the miraculous in everyday life: the earth’s tides. 

 

 

To wit:

 

 

O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

 

 

But of course we can explain the tides, Bill.  It involves the moon, and the sun, and gravity.

 

 

Every fifth-grade science teacher in the country jumped on this howling gaffe.  It was just too much.

 

 

But (in the words of A. A. Milne): did O’Reilly blinch?  No no.

 

A few weeks later, on his website, he posted the following:

 

Okay, how did the moon get there? How'd the moon get there? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How'd the moon get there? How'd the sun get there? How'd it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn't have it? Venus doesn't have it. How come? Why not? How'd it get here?

 

 

A “pinhead” is someone who didn’t pay attention in science class when the tides were being explained.  A “pinhead” is someone who looks in the sky, sees the sun and moon, and says, “God put them here just for me!”

 

 

Also: a “pinhead” is someone who makes a howling mistake in public and then refuses to admit it.

 

 

As the Huffington Post put it: “O’Reilly: zero.  Science: infinity.”

 

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