Friday, February 16, 2007

L'Affaire Sternberg, Part Eighty Million and Four.

Ed Brayton has a good fisking of an article by Jack Cashill in the WorldNutDaily concerning the Sternberg affair. Cashill repeats just about every throughly discredited and dishonest bit of crap that the ID people invented about the affair. My previous entires in the series are here, here, and here.

Jack Cashill, by the way, was interviewed in Flock of Dodos. He was one of the "nice guy" IDists who filmmaker Randy Olson contrasted with the aggressive, obnoxious, and apparently drunk poker playing evolutionist friends of his. But as Ed's fisking demonstrates, Cashill isn't a nice guy at all, he's a lying scumbag. Anyone can put on a smile in front of a camera before turning around and writing an extremely dishonest hit piece -- that doesn't make one a decent person.

Then again maybe Cashill is just dumb and doesn't realize that nearly everything he says in the article is either false or misleading. But we're long past the point of this being a legitimate excuse. If you're going to make serious accusations against people and publish them in a widely read publication (however poor its reputation may be), you'd better make damn sure you've got your facts straight. A casual disregard for the truth is of course a defining characteristic of the ID movement, but you'd think they'd be a little more careful when it comes to libel.