DINOcrat Strategies Against TheoCon Strategeries Won't Win the Press Poodles

Hoping to avoid a bitter public showdown, defenders of the theory of evolution boycotted the first of four days of hearings Thursday over the science curriculum in Kansas, where members of the state Board of Education critical of the standard theory are considering changes to give more weight to creationist ideas.

Mainstream science organizations spurned invitations to participate, dismissing the hearings in Topeka as an effort “to attack and undermine science,” in the view of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science.

As a result, the only witnesses heard Thursday were advocates of a philosophy called “intelligent design,” critics of evolution or both. Pedro Irigonegaray, a Topeka lawyer representing what he called mainstream science, dismissed the event as a “kangaroo court.”...

Well, yes. But it's a heavily covered kangaroo court. But another kangaroo court spawned Inherit the Wind.

In 1925, schoolteacher John Scopes was put on trial in the state of Tennessee for teaching evolution in its schools. In the trial that followed in Dayton, Tennessee, the chaotic atmosphere and intense press coverage earned it the label "Monkey Trial." There, former vice president William Jennings Bryan prosecuted Scopes for disobeying the law against teaching evolution, and famous intellectual Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney. The trial was covered in the press by noted reporter H.L. Mencken.

Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who had been working together since their days as founders of Armed Forces Radio during World War II, were familiar with the Scopes trial and the drama it contained. In the late '40s and early '50s, they recognized a parallel to the anti-intellectual fervor of the Southern opponents to evolution in the current American landscape. Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings to root out Communism in America, especially in the film and theatre communities, was seen by many as a witch hunt, leading friends and co-workers to turn each other in for suspected Communist leanings.

In response to the increasingly censorious climate of McCarthyism, playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play which explored the hysteria of the modern-day witch hunt through the historical guise of seventeenth century witch trials. Similarly, Lawrence and Lee chose an event from history ­ though more recent history ­ as a means of exploring the clash between fundamentalists and free-thinkers, believers and intellectuals. In the Scopes Monkey Trial and in the town of Hillsboro's vehement condemnation of a man who dared to speak a belief contrary to their own, Lawrence and Lee found an allegory through which they could explore the condemnation of leftists and individualists in America as Communists...

Taking a DINOcrat approach and hoping these fools and the big ugly mess will just go away will not work.

The facts are absolutely against the TheoCons- but since when do facts influence these chimps?