The main problem with the Left is that it always becomes the Right once in power. This article by Matt Taibbi illustrates very well why I am completely indifferent to domestic American politics. The Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe deserve each other every bit as much as the competing teams of Salafists in the Middle East or the various combatants in the English Civil War or the Thirty Years War. And virtually all of what passes for the “radical left” or “radical right” is merely a parody of one or the other major tribe.
By Matt Taibbi
In August, 2005, Rolling Stone sent me to cover a freak show. In a small Pennsylvania town called Dover, residents contrived to insert a sentence about teaching “intelligent design” into the curriculum, and fought for its right to do so in an extravagantly-covered trial in the “big city” capital of Harrisburg.
Dover’s school board president, Alan Bonsell, was a fundamentalist who believed God shaped man from dust. It was said Bonsell would stand at his window at night, wondering, as he gazed at the stars, at the intervening hand of God. “If you can’t see that, you’re just not thinking clearly,” he said. His wife supposedly told him he looked like Chuck Norris.
The bureaucratic atmosphere Bonsell presided over was not kind to the eggheads trying to teach. When the head of the district’s science department, Bertha Spahr, begged the board not to promote “intelligent design,” listing past Supreme Court decisions about religion in classrooms, another fundamentalist board member named Bill Buckingham – an ex-cop who wore a lapel pin in the shape of both a Christian cross and an American flag – shouted her down. “Where did you get your law degree?” he snapped. Author Laurie Lebo in the book The Devil in Dover described what happened next:
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