Meant to add earlier...
Krauthammer on ID
Quote:Which brings us to Dover, Pa., Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education, and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.
full column
George Will on ID
Quote:The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board seeking re-election were defeated. This expressed the community's wholesome exasperation with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of "intelligent design'' theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution "is not a fact.''
But it is. And President Bush's straddle on that subject -- "both sides'' should be taught -- although intended to be anodyne, probably was inflammatory, emboldening social conservatives.
full column
A number of conservative writers/thinkers on ID (
do note the common non-denial denial doublespeak eg Kristol, Brooks)
http://teachevolution.blogspot.com/2005/07/new-republic-online-evolutionary-war.html
It isn't at all difficult to conclude, and it seems utterly foolish not to conclude, that the neoconservative find ID appealing for instrumental reasons as elucidated in the original Reason essay.
But they have a problem now. To the degree that the broad populace sees the religious right as becoming extremist and/or dangerously intrusive in civic affairs in the US, to that degree they will become a negative element in maintaining electoral power for the broader conservative movement.
If Kristol and friends understand anything, it is that all hopes and desires for creating policy hinge upon wielding power. There's no real problem if the religious right's organization and vote-getting potential outweighs the negatives of their particular weird ideas (weird to neoconservatives, too) but where they are seen by the other folks in the movement (such as Kristol's crowd) as being a likely vote-negative influence, then the sort of open divisiveness we see in those columns above will become more apparent.
And here's a short primer on Strauss (and who in the modern conservative movement dig the fellow) courtesy of TownHall
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1233