Smooth Pebbles : In the Fair & Balanced view, Mark Foley is suddenly a Democrat

Profile

Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.

BOOKS by David Dobbs

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.â€

The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.

The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.

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In the Fair & Balanced view, Mark Foley is suddenly a Democrat

Category: Interesting if true...
Posted on: October 5, 2006 12:52 AM, by David Dobbs

Boing Boing points out that Fox News has at least thrice identified disgraced Congressman Mark Foley — Republican of Florida, former chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, cyberstalker of adolescent Congressional pages — as a Democrat.

See it to believe it.

Apparently they identified him in captions several times as Mark Foley (D-FL):

and another time they asked, in a caption accompanying an interview with Democratic House Leader Harry Reid, "Did Dems Ignore Foley E-mails to Preserve Seat?":

This seems incredible -- but then again, seems a logical extension of an approach that calls torture coercion, creationism science, and democratic debate a hindrance to the struggle to spread freedom to the world.

I try not to get too upset about such things. And I wonder why I'm writing this in a blog about science (though the "culture" part of my blog title lets me do anything). But the part of me that objects to lousy or fraudulent science -- science that ignores or deliberately subverts the principles of demonstrable, accountable findings that underlie good science -- also objects to the steady assault on rational, secular discourse that's necessary for a democracy to run.

See the original Boing Boing story at Boing Boing: Fox News identifies Foley as a Democrat.

Comments

I didn't believe it until I saw the screenshots. Holy cow!

But, then again, this comes from a media machine that has nearly 2/3 of US citizens convinced that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were behind the 11 Sept terrorist attacks.

When the facts don't agree with policy or events, misrepresent them. Just how gullible are we as a nation?

Posted by: Abel Pharmboy | October 7, 2006 6:27 PM