Your Choice: An Ape's Cousin, or a Dog's Life

UPDATED: According to a recent poll conservatives believe you are going to hell, but that they're not.

The Panda's Thumb has an excellent post on Ann Coulter's latest kook book: Clueless.

Coulter's tome repeats all the long-refuted creationist lies known to weary scholars, in an effort to confuse the uninformed public about evolutionary theory. Look, everyone, I'm going to make this very simple:

We are being groomed by her and the other media sock puppets of rich creationist conservatives for a new American order, one in which the U.S. health care system is for shit! Okay? In lieu of basic health services we are going to be given prayer and preaching and personal guilt, and to accomplish this, these cretins need to rewrite the whole history of science--the most precious thing that we have--in order to push supernaturalism. They who control the past will control the future. Is that clear?

Already, a significant portion of Americans do not have health insurance, and the number of employers who don't offer this basic right are growing. One-fifth of all children live in poverty. Television is killing literacy in this country. And the same Americans who revile Bush for getting us into the Iraq War are the ones who will not step up to the plate and accept responsibility for pushing superstition into our nation's schools. These people have no right to whine about Bush while simultaneously siding with his minions who would teach little kids that the eye was intelligently designed and that people get sick because of "sin."

Whether or not George W. Bush stole the (or both) election(s), we are all responsible for not stealing legitimate science from the next generation of schoolchildren. If we lose the next generation of scientists, it will be our tragedy and our fault, not Bush's. That means that American students must learn evolutionary theory, not the latest supernaturalist garbage. That means that you, dear reader, cannot in any way support the teaching of Intelligent Design or Biblical or Koranic or whatever-have-you creationism in public schools. Facts are facts.

That means if you're a Democrat, you need get your head together and realize that this nation cannot stand mostly hating Bush and mostly denying evolution--and that's exactly what the poll numbers show many of you (far too many) are doing. When you ride with creationism, you ride with Bush & Co. Coulter drew the line that I did not want to draw, so now I will draw it:

Either you accept the fact that evolution is true, that we and the apes had a common ancestor, and that scientific knowledge and the scientific method are worth fighting for--hell, at least worth being called nasty names for--or you accept the role that the creationists want for you: namely, as a slave, a good soldier, an anonymous runner in a race to the bottom of an unenlightened abyss of superstitious fear. It's your choice.

We are, as Dawkins says, a species of ape, and we share a common origin with every living creature on this planet. I don't know how that could offend anyone, being that it is also a beautiful and an elegant concept, but I would say to those that it inexplicably does offend: life as a naked ape is much better than a dog's life, that being a figure of speech meaning, in this context, a life of endless work for increasingly devalued pay, a life filled with fear and humiliation, a life in which health care, clean water, clean air, and adequate food are increasingly hard to attain--the life of being kicked around like a dog.

We are being prepared for that kind of life. I'm not kidding. Not when a best-selling book by a front-girl for invisible, evil monied interests asserts that "biologists are not scientists." Holy crap, that happened in the U.S.S.R. during the Stalin era! All we need now is a head of the Department of Agriculture to assert that grafting will boost crop yield.

We are becoming the Soviet Union, but I'm not going to be a good Party member like little Orphan Annie Coulter. I'm not scared of her or of anyone else who can hurl invective (yes, that goes for you, too, Karl Rove!). She's so dense that she bends light. She's wrong, the puppet-masters behind her are wrong, Rove is wrong, Bush is wrong, and the creationists (Dembski, Behe, Wells, Johnson) are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Take it from a Harley: Evolve or die!