Today's title comes from a recent diatribe disgorged by Moon Griffon that I heard one day while I was driving. Moon Griffon is one of the daytime talk show hosts on the local Fox radio station, but he is purely Louisianan in voice, style, and broadcast area. Now I really can't stand Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, but I don't mind Moon so much, and his accent is just fun to listen to.
However, this particular day he started talking about a study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that found that women, especially older and younger women, were much more likely to be involved in car accidents involving "gas pedal mistakes," i.e. pressing the gas pedal when you meant to press the brake. His response to this study was to slam the federal government and President Obama for their "liberal attacks on women," as he called it. I was so appalled and disgusted that I ended up switching to some pop music station.
My main issue with his ridiculous claims is that Moon completely ignores the scientific process. If he had a complaint about the methods of the study, or something of that nature, then fine, I'd like to hear it. But he seems to accept the study as valid, but uses the facts found by the study to come to the outlandish conclusion that liberals are attacking women. I'm at a loss to what he wants. Does he want the administration to fabricate data to diminish or eliminate the apparent gender disparity in these types of accidents? That would be absurd! Of course, I know what he was really trying to do: he just wanted something, anything, that he could use as ammo for attacks on the left. He really didn't care about the merits of his arguments; as long as he could make some tenuous link to the phrase "liberal attacks on women," he was happy.
I'll take science over spin any day.
