Texas Taliban Snark
Via Daily Kos, I came across this astonishing, mind-blowing quote from Texas Governor Rick Perry:
I am concerned that some the highly diverse Magnet public schools in this city are becoming hotbeds for liberalism. Do we really need free school bus service, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, ESL, special needs and enrichment programs like music, art or math Olympiad? I think we should get back to the basics of the three Rs, reading writing and arithmetic. I mean when is the last time a 6th grade science fair project yielded a cure for a disease?
I mean, that’s just so buggered that my first reaction is that it’s a joke. What sane public official could utter such lunacy? But I kept reading the post and come across this equally whacked Perry quote:
I really don’t see why high schools should have to teach college level courses like calculus, economics, physics, chemistry or biology. Not all children go to college anyway. Texas has plenty of on the job training programs that teach skills and trades. Oil field workers need to know how to operate machines that extract oil. They don’t need calculus to do their job.
Evidently, Perry was speaking to conservative business leaders at a luncheon in Houston and the press corp is mentioned as being there. So that’s it, I figure something like this has to be covered in bold print by the Houston Chronicle and other Texas publications. Nada.
Now I’m suspicious. So I scroll down to the comments at Daily Kos and see that the whole post is a joke and readers are pissed.
Lots of people, including PZ Myers, got fooled, which I find amusing. I guess atheists can be just as credulous as believers.
I think the episode shows how many who calls themselves liberals are completely ignorant of the rational basis for many of the conservative postions. If they understood it (even if they disagreed with it) they would have recognized that the piece was fake.
For example, conservatives are very much in favor of education that encourages competition and promotes excellence. The suggestion that a conservative would object to the math olympiad, university level courses or science projects is absurd.
Keith Kloor, I’m not sure a politically-neutral word like “credulous” does justice to PZ Meyers here. Note how when he has his nose rubbed in how his misunderstanding of reality left him vulnerable to a hoax, he loyally doubles down on partisan smears: “I have been snared by Poe’s law! All I can say in defense is that I was only caught because it’s a hair’s breadth from reality.” If when the facts make one’s initial specific partisan smear untenable one bravely makes a fighting retreat only back to a broader harder-to-refute version of the same partisan smear, that looks like “dogmatic” or “rabidly partisan” to me.
TimG, you wrote “If they understood it (even if they disagreed with it) they would have recognized that the piece was fake” and “the suggestion that a conservative would object to the math olympiad, university level courses or science projects is absurd.” I think there is something to what you’re saying, but I also think you have overstated the point.
(Re. something to what you’re saying: I generally agree with your characterization of Republican mainstream on these issues. And as a libertarian looking in from the outside, it does seem to me that at any given level of sophistication (e.g., comparing talk radio hosts to talk radio hosts, or professors to professors) the left tends to be more confused and ignorant about the right than vice versa.)
I would write instead “… the piece was likely to be fake” and “it would be unusual for a conservative to object …” In any big political movement it happens that people really do sometimes say unlikely and unusual things. With 100 or so nationally-prominent Republican politicians running loose, I rather expect something at least as weird as the hoax quote will actually be said by one of them while the year is still young. One needn’t be any kind of partisan to cynically expect that this year’s news will occasionally imitate this year’s _The Onion_; the rabid partisanship comes in with the notion that for one’s partisan opponents it is the normal state of affairs.
Similarly, I wasn’t expecting a nationally-prominent Democratic politician to say “I would not refer to [Mubarak] as a dictator,” but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that I had to <a href=”http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2011/0127/Joe-Biden-says-Egypt-s-Mubarak-no-dictator-he-shouldn-t-step-down”>check</a>.
Extra snark, only half in cruel jest: leftists should’ve been able to guess that the supposed Perry quote was unlikely to be an authentic gotcha quote of one of their hate objects because it was not a paraphrase or a short phrase quoted without context, but paragraph-length block quotes.:-|
Blah blah blah.
Meanwhile, KK put up a post today about a Texas high school building a $60 million sports arena, even as education funding is faced with billions in cuts in that state.
Come on. We’re talking about Rick Perry, and Texas. The plausibility of the spoof is what made it work.
“And as a libertarian looking in from the outside, it does seem to me that at any given level of sophistication (e.g., comparing talk radio hosts to talk radio hosts, or professors to professors) the left tends to be more confused and ignorant about the right than vice versa.)”
LOL. Yeah, right, as if a ‘libertarian looking in from the outside’ is necessarily a neutral party.
(Cuts which are, btw, also discussed in the for realz part of the Kos article.)