Red State Rabble

Wasn't it the right that was supposed to be so good at framing, that process of using the media to control people's perception of political issues? Weren't they the masters of fine tuning the meanings attributed to words or phrases? The authors who transformed the inheritance tax into the death tax, clear cutting into the "Healthy Forest Initiative," and trampling the Constitution by indoctrinating school children in creationist mythology into "teaching the controversy?"

"Our strategy," writes Phillip Johnson, "has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools."

That was framing then, when ID was initially expanding out of its creationist base and making headway in schools, legislatures, and the media.

This is framing now that ID has begun to contract back into that base following the Dover decision:

"Judge John Jones copied verbatim or virtually verbatim 90.9% of his 6,004-word section on whether intelligent design is science from the ACLU's proposed 'Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law' submitted to him nearly a month before his ruling," said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

Both Ed Brayton of Dispatches From the Culture Wars and Timothy Sandefur on Panda's Thumb have done an excellent job of pointing out why there's nothing to Discovery's latest attack on Jones.

But the really funny thing about the masters of framing at the Discovery Institute is that the more they flail away at the Dover decision, the more they call attention to the fact that ID has been ruled not to be science and can't be taught in public schools.

That was the take-away message voters in Ohio and Kansas took from the trial, and nothing Discovery writes -- and they've done nothing but write about Dover for the past year -- can change that real-world fact.

There's a bonus in all this for defenders of science education, as well. The first ID activist to make the latest, bogus charge against Jones is Michael Behe. He tried it out when he was here in Kansas speaking at KU. Behe's problem -- which is ID's problem -- is that he's now stuck trying to argue that he doesn't really believe astrology is a scientific theory as he testified at Dover.

Every time Behe gives his lame explanation, it calls attention to that testimony, ID's association with pseudoscience, and the outcome of the trial itself.

They made that bed, and now they have to sleep in it.