Dennis Miller Has Left the Reality-Based Community

I'm sure this is old news, but I don't keep up with Miller's career so this just came up on my radar as I was channel surfing last night and stumbled on his O'Really Factor segment. In this case, talking about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, he categorically and absolutely refuses to accept that there were not WMD's in Iraq - he does not care what anybody says - not the CIA, not the UN, not even if Bush himself, the ultimate reality denier, comes out and admits they were wrong, Dennis Miller will stick by his arm chair intelligence instincts and continue to maintain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were secretly ferried over the border to Syria before the invasion. I searched for the transcript or a YouTube video, but it's not up yet. I'll add links if they become available soon.

There's a blog devoted to this kind of denialist thinking. It's worth reading, especially the early posts that discuss the impenetrable bubble that denialists build around their convictions. Miller's is pretty obvious. He has posited a non-falsifiable explanation that will withstand any evidence to the contrary. He has transferred the problem of the absent evidence to another locale to which our intelligence has little access, and further, to a remote time that allows for the dispersal or destruction of the evidence in such a way as to make his conclusion immune to scrutiny even if we did invade Syria and rummage through their stuff.

So why should I care what Dennis Miller says on Fox "News" and what has this to do with science? I don't really care what he says, but I'm always concerned about the mind set that dismisses evidence in order to maintain a hard, unwavering, ideological stance. What's so difficult about drawing tentative conclusions based on the evidence and allowing for the possibility that your conclusions may need to be revised if new evidence surfaces to challenge those conclusions? It just seems so natural, so logical to me, yet an entire industry of pundits and a catastrophic republican administration have been built on the opposite way of thinking. There is some serious emotional weakness masking this macho approach. I can't help tying this in with religion - does religion answers our need, as a species, for that absolute certainty, or do we crave absolute certainty because of our religious upbringing?

I suspect it is the former and we're just stuck with a sizable segment of the population that can't get past it - but of course, I'm willing to change my opinion if evidence surfaces to suggest otherwise. I'm also willing to operate on a daily basis as if I can effect a change in people, if only those few individuals I interact with on a daily basis, my students.