Extremely Lame

Get a load of this tu quoque quote by John McCain. Oh, wait, I can’t quote it here because it’s an AP article and considering I want to quote 39 words, they’ll want $17.50 for using it. And sadly, I can’t find the article anywhere but on AP. Neither Reuters nor UPI have anything on it.

So, I’ll simply link to Discover Magazine’s website so you can read the whole article.

To summarize, in answer to a question about McCain’s hypocrisy of supposedly being anti-pork, but he then selected a nominee that we are discovering to have asked for pork barrel projects.

Of course, instead of answering the question, he decides to attack Obama instead with a tu quoque. It’s a logical fallacy where you try to point out that someone else has done something similar, so it must be okay. On FARK, it’s called the “B-b-b-b-but Clinton!” defense because virtually every criticism leveled against George W. Bush during his first term was responded to with a comparison to Bill Clinton.

But I digress. When asked about his hypocrisy over federal earmarks, McCain compared the earmarks requested by Sarah Palin to Obama’s requests to update Adler Planetarium, the oldest working planetarium in the country and calling the planetarium rubbish in the process.

Yes, that’s right. Planetariums are rubbish. And here I was actually interested in science because of planetariums. My high school had a planetarium and about once a year in elementary school, we’d go to the high school planetarium for science class where Mr. Wafer would show us all kinds of amazing things about the stars.

But what do I know? Planetariums are rubbish. It’s pork. We don’t need ‘em because our students are just so smart and interested in science already. Yeah, part of the reason science education in this country is doing so poorly is because of religious types who want to inject religion into science to “teach the controversy” (by the way, there is no controversy), but even more destructive to science education is the diminishing funding they’re getting.

The diminished funding to science education partly due to people who find science to be rubbish and unnecessary, like Senator McCain, and partly due to the overwhelming focus to teach so that kids can pass a test that is overwhelmingly filled with math and English because that’s all No Child Left Behind focuses on. (Texas is one of the few states where there are standardized tests for science and social studies as well as math, English, and reading.