Je ne sais pas si vous avez vraiment raison cher Francis car Obama est un produit typiquement américain et dans un aucun autre pays au monde une telle candidature aurait été possible.
A propos de Sarah Palin il faut lire l'éditorial enthousiaste de
Melanie Phillips
A star is born
Thursday, 4th September 2008
The woman is a natural. Watch her performance last night here -- and you'll see why the left is in such a panic.
Middle America has found its champion: someone who embodies its values and makes it proud to hold them. She has pulled off something that the left assumed was as likely a development as the sun rising in the west: she makes conservatism attractive, optimistic and fun. She is totally authentic, the real deal: she turns the values of small-town America that she so proudly embodies into a lethal boomerang against the sneering elitists who scorn them. The repercussions will cross the Atlantic: British Tories who have tried to reinvent conservatism as social liberalism may well be sucking their teeth if Sarah Palin actually makes it to the White House.
Well okay, say her detractors, so she’s a good performer -- but she’s still way out there in fruitcake-land because she’s a creationist. Well, if she is I’d like to see the evidence -- because so far all I’ve seen is one statement by her which falls far short of supporting creationism, plus enormous confusion and ignorance among commentators about what creationism actually is. As far as I can see, all she has ever said on the subject, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News two years ago, is that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools. The following day she explained that all she had meant by that was that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms: ‘I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum’.
She would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state’s required curriculum. She simply didn’t think that any views should be excluded on the basis of religious or scientific opinion. It seemed that she had never even thought much about creationism. She was simply expressing a liberal view about the flow of ideas.
But here’s where the confusion among commentators kicks in. Palin is a Christian, which means she believes that the world had a Creator. She shares that belief with other Christians along with Jews and Muslims the world over. Unless one takes the view that all religious belief is certifiable, there is nothing remotely odd about a person of faith believing in God. Indeed, one might say this is a prerequisite (unless one happens to belong to the Church of England). But various commentators have committed the howler of assuming that belief in a Creator is creationism. Not so. Creationism is very specifically the belief that the world was literally created in six days. Millions of believers in God agree that this is absurd and irrational.
Then there is the further confusion – fomented in large measure by the astoundingly ignorant assertions made by lawyers and judges in the various US court cases over the teaching of creationism in American schools – that creationism is the same thing as Intelligent Design. It is not. Intelligent Design simply holds that life could not have originated spontaneously, but must have been at source the product of some kind of purposeful force. It does not deny evolution, rather the claim that evolution somehow spontaneously created itself. It is a view held by growing numbers of scientists, several of great distinction, and arises out of the very complexity of life that science has uncovered. Whether or not this is a well-founded theory it cannot be argued that, like creationism, it stands in opposition to science and reason. Yet the furore over Sarah Palin has persistently elided both creationism and ID with each other and with her actual belief in a Creator.
Maybe she is a creationist – but so far it’s just another smear.