Friday, January 19, 2007

Fossil Fools

Watching Tom Roeser's feeble attempts to stop the future via his baseless, ad hominem attacks on Sen. Barack Obama is a guilty pleasure of mine.

Today, in pursuit of his ongoing Inquisition regarding Sen. Obama's religious faith, Roeser tries and fails to portray snopes.com as an "Obama fan's website".

Snopes.com -- named after a family in the works of William Faulkner -- is also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages. The mission of snopes.com is to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends, including Tom Roeser's favorite:


But Snopes.com does not just blindly declare myths true or false.

Snopes.com also provides carefully cited evidence for their debunking and confirmation as well. In the case of the Obama rumor that so plagues the mind of the Roeser, the snopes.com team cites four sources -- Obama's two books and two published profiles -- for its determination that Obama is as Christian that he claims to be.

But Obama's repeated public profession of his Christian faith cannot satisfy the Roeser Inquisition.

Roeser declares that the accused is to blame for the Inquisition's unsubstantiated allegations. "[I]t is the Obama people’s fault for neglecting to lay out the cards on his religion. *** And I’m going to keep at this until Obama speaks for himself and allows reporters *** to question him in depth."

Yes, the Grand Inquisitor says that Obama will be presumed to be a blasphemer or heretic until he presents himself before the Tribunal.

***

So what are we to make of Tom Roeser?

When one considers his fossilized views and the amount of filthy muck that he casts about, one imagines a dinosaur wildly flailing about in a pool of tar -- desperately trying to find footing as it sinks slowly, inevitably, into oblivion.

But then one remembers that not all fossils were mighty dinosaurs.

There are also the fossils trapped in amber -- the insects. The flies and gnats who once flitted about, pestering and nipping at beasts much larger than themselves.

One cannot know the mind of a fly, but one can wonder if it was motivated by something more than merely its love for the taste of blood.

Did the fly also long for the attention of the much bigger beings that it orbited about? When the fly found itself trapped in sticky amber, did he think back to a time when his tiny nips were acknowledged by a swish of a tail or the flick of an ear? Did the fly say to itself, "Behold. Look at how mighty I was. I confronted the might beast and engaged it in battle. Verily, I must have been mighty indeed."


But perhaps I am over-thinking my lithification metaphors...

After all, we are talking about baseless, ad hominem attacks on a man's personal religious faith. And so, the fossil equivalent now becomes clear:

The Tom Roeser Blog - It's Coprolithic

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Coprozoic, perhaps.

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