if bush believes this, he'll believe anything

So, de facto president George W. Bush has opined that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in the schools "so people can understand what the debate is about." For the uninformed few, intelligent design is a theory that living things are so incredibly complicated they couldn't possibly have come about on their own, so some agent must have started things. In otherwords, it's a euphemism that people use when they don't have the cojones to argue for Biblical-style Creationism. It's also chock-full of holes. How is it even vaguely logical for some intelligent designer to include in our lungs a substance that ruins our lungs, counterbalanced by another chemical that neutralizes this effect?

I guess intelligent design has another advantage: you don't have to choose among the various creation myths out there -- Christianity has no monopoly on funny ideas about how it all started. Personally, I like the Chinese version with the Cosmic Egg and a goddess forming people out of the mud of the Yellow River. Hey, it's no weirder than taking a rib out of a guy to make a woman.

But I must say, Bush's statement surprises me a little. I mean, how often has the Bush junta supported letting two sides of a story get an equal airing? I look forward to the day they support a curriculum in which students can study the dozens of indications that the Ohio election was fiddled with in November 2004 side by side with the assertion that everything was above-board so they can assess both sides of that debate, too.

Just another example of Bush's ongoing war on science -- or at least science that is politically inconvenient for him and the theocratic wing of the Republican Party to which he is so beholden.

In the same session with reporters, Bush said he believed Rafael Palmeiro's denial that he used steroids. Palmeiro's testing was challenged and retested, with support from the most ferocious union in sports. Clearly he had steroids in his system. Based on what he said about Mr. 3000's claims, Bush is either loyal and naive, incredibly stupid, lying, or all of the above.

Hey, if Bush believes Palmeiro's disavowals of wrong-doing, he'll never get rid of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, John Bolton, or anybody else accused of crimes unless they're dragged away from the office in handcuffs.