Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

More Woes for Bush

(Reprinted from the issue of December 1, 2005)

The Bush administration’s problems just keep on coming. Public support for the Iraq war, already feeble, took a body blow when John Murtha, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, said it was time to bring the troops home. This caused a sensation in the media — and a serious embarrassment for President Bush.

Murtha had credentials. A Vietnam combat veteran and a retired Marine colonel, he was no dove, but generally a supporter of military action and not an easy target for the Republicans to attack. When Vice President Dick Cheney tried, it backfired badly. Murtha quickly retorted with a sarcastic allusion to the “five deferments” that had allowed Cheney to avoid serving in Vietnam, whereupon Cheney changed his tune, allowing that debate over the war is “legitimate” but insisting that it was outrageous to say it had been fostered by deceit.

Bush weighed in too, accusing the Democrats of trying to rewrite history by accusing him of having lied us into war. After all, he pointed out, the Democrats had seen the same intelligence he had and had approved of toppling Saddam Hussein; now they wanted to deny their own partial responsibility for the war? He had a point, though he neglected to mention that he’d withheld some of that intelligence from them.

The media also misleadingly portrayed Murtha as an all-out hawk who had had a sudden, dramatic conversion, when in fact he had openly expressed some reservations about the war for a long time. Still, he seemed to be an honest man and a good soldier who put the country’s interest ahead of party, so his statement had far more impact than it would have had coming from almost any other Democrat.

To counteract it, the Republicans put a dummy resolution before the House calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. That was more than the phased withdrawal Murtha had demanded, so it was crushed, with only three Democrats voting in favor of it.

For those who weren’t paying close attention, this created the momentary appearance of bipartisan support for the war and repudiation of a policy of “bugging out.” This was misleading too, but at least it put the Democrats back on the defensive for the nonce.

In a nutshell, the war is a losing issue for the Republicans, but they hoped at least to prevent it from becoming a winning issue next year for the Democrats. Meanwhile, the war’s neoconservative enthusiasts in the media quoted Bill Clinton and other critics of the administration, at home and abroad, warning of the “threat” of Saddam Hussein, his “weapons of mass destruction,” and the necessity of “regime change” in Iraq.

It was all reminiscent of the Nixon era, when the Republicans found themselves in charge of an unpopular war the Democrats pretended they hadn’t started. But it sounded as desperate as the last-ditch slogan “It didn’t start with Watergate.” This time we seemed to be hearing an updated version: “It didn’t start with Condoleezza Rice.” Which may be true, but won’t be a very inspiring campaign theme.
 
Bethell vs. Darwin

We are now battered by so many confusing political issues traveling under the name of “science” — having to do with global warming, nuclear power, AIDS, stem-cell research, cloning, endangered species, and the teaching of evolution in public schools — that the layman may be tempted to shrug it all off and leave such matters to the experts. Well, don’t. Just grab a copy of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery) and enjoy a good read. And some good laughs.

The author is my old friend Tom Bethell, a masterly writer who lights up daunting questions with simple explanations, apt analogies, startling facts, and often hilarious understatements. His book is in no way “against” science; on the contrary, it’s deeply respectful of scientific method, properly applied. What it exposes is the abuse of that method by various charlatans who seek political power, publicity, and government contracts. Not to mention the pleasure of duping gullible journalists and causing mass hysteria.

We are currently being urged, as Bethell notes, to panic over global warming. Unless the government enacts totalitarian measures pronto, one pundit warned, “by the end of the decade our rivers may have reached the boiling point.” That was written in 1970.

Such preposterous prophecies are now routine; social pressures play a role too and, Bethell reports, the magazine Science has rejected articles by distinguished scientists who dissent from the fashionable fear-mongering. (Notice that these allegedly imminent crises always require more government, never less.)

Like what passes for merely factual history, what passes for objective science is heavily infected by propaganda. Many things we hear every day — so often that we assume they must be established truths — are, in fact, nonsense.

The book culminates in a lively examination of that greatest of scientific errors, Darwin’s theory of evolution. In fairness to Darwin, he couldn’t have foreseen some of the difficulties modern biochemistry would present; nevertheless, he should have known better. Maybe it’s just my own narrow mind, or perhaps my deeper mammalian bigotry, but try as I may, I have never been able to perceive much resemblance between the whale and the mosquito. Even if they were the same size it would elude me.

It comes as a relief to learn that this is not a mere eccentricity of my own; Bethell explains why even some sophisticated biologists share it. The eye of the octopus is very much like the human eye, for example, yet nobody thinks men and octopi had a common ancestor with eyes; did both creatures just happen to acquire such complex organs accidentally and independently? Why is “intelligent design” out of the question?

Not only is the theory, as Bethell shows, at once tautological and incoherent; the fossil record is so devoid of evidence for evolution that the “proof” has had to be supplied by desperate speculation, logical fallacies, poor parallels, hopeful predictions, wacky experiments (on fruit flies), empty rhetoric — even outright fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of embryos became notorious among scientists. (One advantage of experimenting on fruit flies, by the way, is that “the animal rights people don’t object.”)

If you still think evolutionism is “science,” your belief won’t survive this marvelously incisive book. And the blazing coda, on the National Institutes of Health, will convince you that we need a constitutional separation of science and state.

The book is attractively designed, but the real treat is the writing. Few men write expository prose as fine as Tom Bethell’s, every word measured, never a word wasted, always elegant in its simplicity, and so compact of expression that it almost defies summary. The same can be said of C.S. Lewis and George Orwell, but not many others.


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Joseph Sobran