You may recall Will Ferrell doing his impersonation of George W. Bush during his presidency. On Saturday Night Live, he reprises his role to announce that he is entering the race for the Republican presidential nomination and while doing so sizes up all his main competitors.
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It is a striking testimony to how far the Republican party has gone off the rails in its xenophobia and anti-Muslim venom that some people in the party are now looking back fondly at George W. Bush as a model of how one should respond to the appalling actions taken by some Muslims, such as in the San Bernadino attacks. Following the events of 9/11 he is now said to have struck the correct note, carefully distinguishing between the specific beliefs of the people who carried out those attacks and the vast mass of people who happened to share their same religion.
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Marco Rubio asserts that he cannot see any evidence of discriminatory actions against Muslims in America. Has he not heard of the internet? It has been full of news stories about random people are perceived to look like Muslims being targeted for harassment as you can see here, here, and here.
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With all the attention going to the Republican primary race, we should not forget that there is a Democratic contest too. The media may not have as much interest in it because there is less drama and because of the belief that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable choice. While it is true that she does have a commanding lead in the polls, her neo-liberal policies of being a Wall Street-friendly warmonger who takes Republican-lite positions on economic issues and is only liberal on the GRAGGS (guns, race, abortion, god, gays, sex) issues, though even there on some of them she is a latecomer and less than enthusiastic.
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The Daily Show looks at the obsession the US has with guns and the perpetual fear that the seem to have that their right to buy guns freely will be taken away from them which leads them to rush to buy even more following a mass shooting.
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Every four years the media salivates at the possibility of a political party’s nominee not being decided by the primary process, with a multiplicity of candidates going to the convention with sufficient delegates to have a shot at winning the nomination. The media drools at the possibility of public and backroom wheeling and dealing until one of the candidates or, even better, a rank outsider becomes the nominee.
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One of the features of science is that most of the time the community of scientists in any particular sub-specialty will agree on the basic paradigms that govern that field. While there will always be some scientists who refuse to accept the paradigm, most work within the consensus. This changes when the paradigm begins breaks down due to the fact that anomalies start to proliferate and no progress is made on major problems. Then more and more scientists start to look for new paradigms that promise to radically change the way they view the world. Those periods of scientific revolutions are exciting but rare.
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I wrote a few days ago about the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls auditioning for Sheldon Adelson’s money by appearing before his group called the Republican Jewish Coalition. The Daily Show‘s newest correspondent Adam Lowitt had a pretty funny segment dissecting their appearance.
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In his latest attempts to try and derail the Donald Trump juggernaut that is trampling all over his own candidacy, Jeb Bush accuses Trump of using “dog whistle politics” to gain popularity with his call to ban all Muslims from entering the country, saying:
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Trevor Noah of The Daily Show points out how, because he is the leading candidate of one of the two major political parties, Donald Trump has given permission for people to say things that they may have formerly felt obliged to either suppress or only share with those they were sure shared their views. Now, pretty much anything goes.
