a little detective work...

Ed Brayton has a bit of theme today.  First, he shows how Richard Stickler, the Bush appointee for head of the Mine and Health Safety Administration (a rather important task as we've seen this past month) was a mining executive with an incident record "twice the national average", who was rejected by the then Republican controlled Senate twice before finally being stuck in there as a recess appointment.  Talk about cronyism...

Then he gives us a summary of Chris Rodda's detective work on tracing down a quote mine through the religious right's "phone tag" game, from its first source through its distortions and uncredited references to its final appearance in books saying the opposite of what was originally written.  If this is what "history" means to conservatives?  Well, I'd rather not go there...

them creationists...they can't even lie about the fact that they're going to lie!

Infamous atheist and biologist PZ Meyers was filmed for what he was told by a producer for Rampant Films was to be an open, objective documentary on the ID vs science debate.  Well, there was the BIG lie.  He's actually going to be featured and effectively targetted in a documentary with fictional add-ons called "Expelled" which is a pro-ID propaganda work trying to paint the same stupid picture of this big bad scientist conspiracy, a "darwinist cult", striving to kick religion out of schools and blacklist religious scientists.

In short, by lying to him about the actual theme and intent of the work, they made him, along with Richard Dawkins and Eugenie Scott, stooges for their "message".

I'm not saying, say, that Moore's tactics are any better, but it does go to show that as much as the opposition will bitch about his approach, it won't stop them from using it.

In fact, their own publicity is full of lies.  It says this film "confronts" scientists, yet as PZ describes, this was anything but a confrontation.  It was an open, civil, and generally emotionless discussion with no hint to PZ that it was being directed to produce quote-mine-able material.  PZ and likely Dawkins would have welcomed a confrontational stance, but that's not what happened.

The film's supposed to be out in February.  I don't intend to actually see it, but I do intent to bittorrent it and pass it around so everybody can see it without giving those "lying-for-Jesus-again" bastards a dime.  Why bother watching?  It'll just be (if the trailer was anything close to the final product) a huge pack of lies, unsupported assertions, and distorted quote-mining of the counter-claims.

BTW, it's already been reported that most pro-science and anti-ID comments on the movie site's official blog are being regularly deleted.  Par for the course for those assholes.

On the bright side, it moves PZ to being within 2 degrees of Kevin Bacon...