Monday, September 01, 2008
Crunch Time
Rod Dreher, the only man with worst taste in pseudonyms than Theodore Beale, has delivered himself of a spectacularly confused attempt at a drive-by mugging of both Barak Obama and PZ Myers.
The "Crunchy Con" points to a short piece by Steve Waldman:
Steve Waldman foresees that some liberals won't be able to keep themselves from making fun of Sarah Palin's views sympathetic to intelligent design, thus leaving Obama's outreach to people of faith in tatters:
In fact, this is almost inevitable that some liberal bloggers will do just that and the Republicans will gather up every one of those Christian-mocking quotes to prove that the Republicans respect them and Democrats don't. For Obama to avoid this fate, he's probably going to do a Sister Souljah on those Democrats who mock Palin, specifically coming to her defense on matters of faith.
The amusing thing is that Crunchy actually quote mines Waldman, whose point is obviously too subtle for him, though I think it is still not the problem that either of them may think. Waldman prefaces the part quoted by Crunchy with the following:
[I]f Democrats start attacking her as a Creationist yokel, it will undo much of Obama's faith outreach.
But, again, given the believers that Obama is realistically targeting, how many of them are going to see creationism-bashing as the same thing as mocking Christianity? Nor is PZ (or the rest of the science-favoring blogosphere, for that matter) so identified with either the Democratic party or Obama that he would need to do much more than point to one or two posts by PZ attacking his own faith and issue a platitude or two about the openness of our democracy and the blessings of freedom of speech.
In short, Obama's faith is so well known and apparently genuine that he need not have a "Sister Souljah moment," because he pretty much lives one every day.
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