Left, Right, and Centered

Have You Heard? Obama Is An Alien Scout From Regulon VI. July 31, 2009

Alright, let’s do this little dance yet again.  The right is bereft of actual ideas, so they, led by Rush “I hope he fails” Limbaugh, and Glen “Obama is the racist” Beck, keep throwing malodorous crap against the wall, just seeing what might stick.  They’ve got the “Obama isn’t an American” nonsense, apparently thinking that the Hawaiian authorities had the foresight to fake his birth certificate five decades ago, knowing he’d one day be president, and most recently, the vapid vaporous duo of Anne Coulter and Michelle Mailkin floated the lie that the Gates question was planted at Obama’s press conference.  The only trouble is that the person asking the question, an actual journalist, says that not only that such a accusation is outrageous, but that planting such a loaded question would be akin to planting a stick of dynamite at a gas station.  The latest load of crap fertilizing the right wing blogosphere is the idea that John Holdren, Obama’s science adviser, is the 2009 Josef Mengele of eugenics.  This after George Bush stocked his White House with a hundred graduates of Liberty University who weren’t sure if the earth wasn’t flat.  For the last time: Holdren was co-author of a textbook in 1977 that listed an array of population control measures, some of them quite radical.  He didn’t advocate those measures:

In 1977, more than thirty years ago, Holdren was the third author (with Paul and Anne Ehrlich) of a textbook entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment. It was a gigantic tome, fully 1,051 pages in length. In one vast 66 page chapter devoted to “Population Policies,” the authors surveyed a gamut of measures that had been undertaken or considered to control human population growth—including the most extreme. Those included coercive or “involuntary fertility control” measures, such as forced abortions and sterilizations.

However, to describe these measures is different from advocating them. And in fact, the Ehrlichs and Holdren concluded by arguing that noncoercive measures were what they supported: “A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences”—such as birth control and access to abortions. In fairness, their text does read as dated today, ripe for quote mining. They were writing in very different times thirty years ago; but even if they were defending these positions then (and they weren’t), that hardly means that they do today.  Let’s move on to the next lie, exageration, or wingnut conspiracy theory, shall we?

BW