Politicians babble while real issues burn

“Put the lime in the Coke, you nut, and drink it all up.” This could be the way we deal with politics in America. The pressing issues are too controversial to deal with, so our politicians squeeze in the issues that take away from the harsh problems, like lime into a soda.

This means talking about fake topics such as evolution, euthanasia and abortion so much that we don’t ask them too many questions about the real ones, like say the war or the economy.

For example, presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback, in a opinion piece in The New York Times, referred to evolution as “an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world.”

He seems to speak of it as a character flaw, a commercial tactic spun by corporate America.

As if imagining the more-than-slightly odd link between evolution and materialism wasn’t enough, the senator also declared that evolution has no room for a guiding intelligence, which is why he refuses to ascribe to it.

So now he has decided that what he really believes in is intelligent design. If he is consistent in his belief system, I expect there to be an announcement of how he doesn’t believe in the laws of physics either because there is no room for a guiding intelligence in the whole gravity concept.

It seems to be fashionable now for a lot of our politicians to wrinkle their noses at science and follow a whole alternate-my-beliefs-as-my-chi-directs-me sort of a path.

In fact, during the Republican presidential candidates debate in Simi Valley, the candidates raised their hands so that there would be no doubts as to where they stood on the God or science war.

Of course, there were no hands raised or buzzers dinged for the war in Iraq or even our image across the world.

But hey, this is America.

When we have a war to think of, possible terrorist plots on JFK Airport, and Social Security and Medicare slowly circling the drain, we focus our energies and our TV cameras into asking our politicians what they make of evolution.

When we have presidential hopefuls writing to The New York Times, not about the state of the nation, but evolution, we know that our politics are being extremely diluted.

Another event elbowing its way into headlines recently was the release of Dr. Jack Kevorkian after eight years of prison for administering euthanasia to his patients. This guy, dubbed Dr. Death, was imprisoned immediately after the government pounced on his belief in (and practice of) a person’s right to die.

Here’s old Jack thrown at once behind bars for carrying out the last wishes of ailing patients, but it takes the same billowing sails of legal justice four years to convict I. Lewis Libby for truly harmful corruption.

Jack got eight years, Scooter is whining about 30 months.

Again, we are faced with the odd reality of a political system that slips and glides through the choking problems but chooses to dramatize the unnecessary or the contradictory.

I love the president for attacking a woman’s right to choose by citing religion and ethics while boldly (and conveniently) forgetting that we decided on the matter in Roe v. Wade.

What we really needed these last few years was a strong leader to speak of the preservation of life while simultaneously committing thousands of troops to such a credible war in Iraq.

Previously we have not only had the Supreme Court declaring certain abortion to be legal, but also scholars from various field proving its necessity.

With all this, the last thing we want to do after graduation is to walk into the real world and realize that we may be responsible for solving real problems.

No ““ we like our coke with lime.

E-mail Joshi if you’re wondering why no one is talking about the

monumental Pluto controversy.

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