Scott Walker’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Answer

Does it matter if Obama is a Christian or not? No, but it matters how Republicans answer stupid questions like that.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been surging in recent weeks, and there is a sense he could be the guy to bridge the gap between the Republican establishment and the grassroots conservative base. But campaigns are crucibles, and if the last couple of days are a harbinger of things to come, he’s in trouble. Could it be that the governor who fought so courageously against Wisconsin unions might not be ready for prime time on the national stage?

No, I’m not talking about his lack of a college degree, which should not in any way disqualify him. Walker’s real trouble started when former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani touched off a media firestorm by saying: “I do not believe that the president loves America.” Then, as Dana Milbank noted, “Walker, just a few seats away, said . . . nothing. Asked the next morning on CNBC about Giuliani’s words, the Republican presidential aspirant was spineless: “The mayor can speak for himself. I’m not going to comment on what the president thinks or not. He can speak for himself as well. I’ll tell you, I love America, and I think there are plenty of people—Democrat, Republican, independent, everyone in between—who love this country.”

This was pretty weak sauce; he neither supported nor condemned Rudy’s remarks. If you want to know the correct way to answer this question—a way that both dings the media, and actually responds to the question appropriately, look to Sen. Marco Rubio’s response: “I don’t feel like I’m in a position to have to answer for everyone in my party who makes a claim,” he told TV station WPBF. “Democrats aren’t asked to answer every time Joe Biden says something embarrassing. So I don’t know why I should answer every time a Republican does.”

“I will suffice it to say,” Rubio continued, “I believe the president loves America. His ideas are bad.”

(Maybe Walker could have stolen Rubio’s template for answering these “gotcha” questions, which is to chastise the media before pooh poohing the wedge “gotcha” question—and then finish by pointing out Obama is a horrible president.)

Yeah, that didn’t happen. On Saturday, Dan Balz and Robert Costa of the Washington Post asked Walker if President Obama was a Christian. Now, I have no idea why this question was relevant, but that’s not the point. Good candidates know how to effectively answer or parry stupid or irrelevant inquiries. Instead, Walker made this a story with this answer: “I don’t know,” he told the Post. “I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that ... I’ve never asked him that. You’ve asked me to make statements about people that I haven’t had a conversation with about that. How [could] I say if I know either of you are a Christian?”

In case you were wondering, the correct answer was not “I don’t know.” The correct answer would have been, “Yes the president is a Christian. His policies are bad.” (Question: Why is it so damned difficult for someone to say that Obama is a Christian who loves America—and he also happens to have been a really bad president? Why not grant him this small concession? He’s never going to be on the ballot again, so why are Republicans still fighting the last war?) A slightly less perfect answer (but still acceptable) might have been, “This is silly. Why are you asking me about someone else’s religion when we’ve got a huge national debt, Iran going nuclear, and ISIS running rampant in the Middle East?” He gave just about the worst possible answer one could imagine.

As you might expect, some conservatives on Twitter are rallying to his defense. They’d rather stick it to the media than find a way to overcome them. They believe that Walker’s answer somehow heroically demonstrated the absurdity of the media. They seem more interested in a candidate who wants to win the argument than one who wants to win the election. And they are less concerned about Walker’s inability to appropriately handle the question than they were by the fact that the question had been asked in the first place. In their minds, Walker is some sort of folk hero for providing that inept answer. But I can assure you, that’s not how the majority of Americans (who aren’t conservative activists on Twitter) will see it.

Again, I’m not suggesting this was a relevant or appropriate question to ask the governor of Wisconsin. I just know how the world works. As the saying goes, I didn’t write these rules, I just abide by them. And, what I am suggesting is that, this is the NFL. When you run for president—when you leave Wisconsin and go to Paris and New York City and Washington, DC and Iowa—you invite all sorts of questions. Some of these questions will be tough, others will be silly or irrelevant or “gotcha” questions. The good politicians can answer them effectively.

Conservatives should be worried that Walker hasn’t proven capable of navigating these land mines. Make no mistake: The media is biased. There is a double standard. And surrogates and center-right media—not candidates for president—ought to call them out. It is still possible to triumph in this hostile environment. To win, conservatives have to be twice as good. The liberal media had a monopoly in the 1980s, yet Ronald Reagan still managed to be the Great Communicator. I’m tired of this whining and playing the victim card. That’s what liberals do. If Republicans are to win the White House, conservatives will have to take this advice: Learn to adapt and overcome—not complain about media bias.

They asked him a question about evolution recently and his answer wasn't' the best. Here's what the answer should have been:

The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.

The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:

The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.

The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)

The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)

The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.

The question of irreducible complexity.

The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.

The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.

The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).

The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.

The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...

The question of genetic entropy.

The obvious evidence of design in nature.

The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.

Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

I ask you: What could be stupider than that?

Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.

Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal. There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.

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