The malignant Jack Cashill

Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he's not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he's a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn't have two heads, he didn't tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual differences when we humanize our opponents.

But Jack Cashill has gone on to grander and ever more insane things. He's a regular contributor to Wingnut Daily, that awful online rag of credulous far right wing pseudojournalism, and he authors the kinds of dishonest hackwork that Teabaggers drool over. His latest effort is penning paranoid conspiracy theory books about Obama, and he's in the news right now for an absurdly bad photoshop job: he or his sources edited a photo of Obama with his grandparents, snipping Obama out of the picture and then claiming that the photo of the three of them had been the real photoshop job. Too bad their hackwork was so awful that they managed to leave Obama's knee in their so-called 'original' photo.

And now, hilariously, Joseph Farah, the kook who publishes WND, has openly admitted that they "publish some misinformation by columnists", referring to Cashill.

I knew he was bad from the start. It ought to be a gigantic red flag on anyone's credibility when they are peddling the kind of intellectual dishonesty that we see in creationism, and it's no surprise when liars of that sort metastasize into politics.

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