Elf Sternberg

Does anyone remember Roman Hruska^[?]? He was a U.S. Senator from Nebraska. He became famous for an incident on the floor of the U.S. Senate in which he was defending the nomination of Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Responding to the criticism that Carswell was mediocre as a judge, Hruska responded

So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there.

Unfortunately for Americans, Hruska's stance has become pretty much the usual fare of modern media: for every thinking person who appears on the TV screen, she must be balanced by someone's who's brain was last seen on a milk carton.

The latest example of stunning stupidity comes from Whoopie Goldberg's show, The View, and her co-host Sherri Shepherd. In an exchange between herself, Goldberg, and Barbara Walters, Shepherd said she doesn't know if the world is round or flat:

GOLDBERG: Is the world flat?

SHEPHERD: Is the world flat? (laughter)

GOLDBERG: Yes.

SHEPHERD: ... I Don't know.

GOLDBERG: What do you think?

SHEPHERD: I-- I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.

WALTERS: You've never thought about whether the world was round or flat?

SHEPHERD: I tell you what I've thought about. How I'm going to feed my child--

While this story has been widely reported, what has not been reported is Shepherd's flat-out admission earlier in the same show that she "doesn't believe in evolution, period." In that case, if she ever catches a Staph infection^[?], she should be happy with perfectly old-school penicillin, right?

You have to love her appeal to "screw knowledge, I have to take care of the children. Whoopie, think of the chilllllldrrrenn!!"

Sigh. Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

[Hat tips to Huffington Post (they've got it on video!), Boing Boing, The Daily Background, and of course PZ Myers.]