Adam Felber at Fanatical Apathy has two posts that help to put the American political scene in perspective: it is insane.

Both the The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Intelligent Design and The Universal Lingerie Theory of American Presidents help people understand what is occurring, whether they want to know or not.

The marsupial master of miniscule, skippy, responds to a Wall Street Journal article but allowed this statement to go unchallenged: “… there is no exam to pass or society to join to become a blogger — anybody can set up a “web log” to publish his or her ideas…”.

There are among the “mighty handful” who drop by this corner of blogtopia^TM [skippy] some who provide technical support to computer users. I have done it long enough to have had to explain that copying a diskette does not involve a Xerox^TM machine, that it is a bad idea to use a magnet to hold a diskette in place on a document stand, and “I haven’t the faintest bloody idea why you have to click on Start to shut down the computer, but that’s what Windows requires.”

To state “anyone can set up a web log” is prima facie evidence of technical ignorance. There is a certain skill level required before one can master Blogger, arguably the simplest of the blogging tools. I dare say that after 15 minutes with the WSJ technical support staff I would be able to find a large group of people at the newspaper who would never get a blog up and running on their own. That is the “exam” you must pass and that is the reason the Dean campaign hired two experienced bloggers to set up their system.

To join the “society” of bloggers requires writing something that others make the effort to find and read.

If the editors of the Wall Street Journal are so upset about blogs, they should tell their readers not to outsource jobs. That would slow the pace. They could also do some fact checking and hire better writers, but that’s probably too hard.

Two articles caught my eye today and caused me to consider the place of context in the search for understanding.

Kevin Drum at Political Animal wrote about Lawrence Summers, Harvard president addressing the lack of women in the hard sciences and then Avedon Carol of the Sideshow wrote about rebirth of Bush.

The comments that Summers made have to be viewed in the context of being the head of an organization that has long been accused of discrimination against women. What he said would not be considered as bad if it didn’t resemble an attempt to weasel out of responsibility for the perceived problems at Harvard and to demonstrate the lack of attention he seems to have paid to it.

Bush, on the other hand, has been consciously removing the context of his entire life. He continuously claims that everything that happened before he was “reborn” as a Christian is now irrelevant, because everything he did before was washed away. It would appear Bush is attempting to claim the “resurrection” without ever suffering the required death. I doubt that Joseph Campbell would agree that this tact is sufficient for the classification as hero in a myth cycle. I would also note that Bush denied this exemption to Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed in spite of being reborn.