A Fool and his Words are Soon Parted

Not-So-Great Moments in Journalism and Governance January 10, 2006

Today, on “kentucky.com” (provided by the Lexington Herald-Leader), the following appeared:

FRANKFORT � Gov. Ernie Fletcher tonight laid out his 2006 agenda that hits on key components of the Republican platform, such as capping lawsuit awards, encouraging the teaching of �intelligent design� and enacting so-called right-to-work legislation that addresses labor unions.

Note: I did not embed the question marks in this paragraph. I realize that this is some formatting that’s not compatible with Firefox (which is what I used to first view the story), but in this case, it provides more than a bit of comedy.

First, there’s “FRANKFORT ?”.

What? This is our state capitol? Is everything open to question? Or, is the not-so-subtle editorial comment “We can’t believe this is our state capitol!” What appears in Internet Explorer is an “em dash,” providing a line of demarcation between the locale and the story. Regardless, in Firefox, the effect was quite comical.

Then there’s the slam on ID with “?intelligent design?” As if the story is saying, “they call this intelligent?” I thought this was the end of my entertainment.

I was wrong.

Reading further, I found this nugget:

But along with those tenets � many of which Fletcher already had foretold � he also proposed an array of education and health reforms.

Which reads a bit like “I think the word we’re looking for is ‘tenets,’ but I’m not really sure, and I don’t have a thesaurus handy.” Did Fletcher fortell these tenets? Is he a soothsayer?

There’s more, but the capper (for me) was:

�Educational achievement and Kentucky�s economic future go hand in hand,� Fletcher said. �To improve education we must keep and attract quality educators.�

We’re going to have educational achievement? In KY? What will happen to our economic future? Improve education? Did Fletcher say this? Must we really attract quality educators?

Having heard that Mr. Fletcher is promoting ID to be taught as science in the classroom, and given recent legal judgements, I think many of these should be formatted as questions in Internet Explorer too.