Give it up for Dover, PA. On election day Dover threw out all the Republican members of its school board. The eight repudiated board members had made themselves nationally infamous for requiring the teaching of intelligent design in the schools.
At the same time in Kansas a state board voted to have the teachers attack evolution in what used to be science classrooms out there, where the wheat grows so high it crawls into people’s ears and sneaks up into their brains.
The universe may not have been intelligently designed, but somebody smart has given the Democrats an opportunity in all this. The party of the donkey has been in a thicket of confusion for years and years with nothing to hit the Republicans over the head with. Generations ago, the Democrats had the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover and the malefactors of great wealth with which to repeatedly slam the GOP on its elephantine backside. More recently the Democrats could attack the Republicans as the party of racial indifference, although that did not work as well because it was necessary to make qualifications and insert little exceptions.
For a while it was better than nothing, then it became nothing and Democrats could no longer win elections by attacking the Republicans for their indifference to civil rights. Since then the D’s have had nothing to club the GOP with while the Republicans whack them with the baby killer or gay marriage or peace lover label. All the D’s could do was stand and take it while murmuring, “we’re only just a little liberal, progressive really. We only want to kill very small babies, teeny-weeny three cell babies.”
Now the Democrats have a stick. No, a club. The opportunity is there for them to label the Republicans the Party of Superstition, the anti-science party, the Dark Ages Party, the anti-research and development party, the party of retrograde eccentrics who would change America from a world leader to a world lagger.
So give it up for Dover and make it clear it’s the battle of science versus the crackpots and the wheat heads.