From AP: "'Intelligent Design' Court Battle Begins."

This one makes me go ape-#$%@! -- not only because we're still debating a topic that scientists put to rest 100 years ago, but because I'm afraid I will throw something at my TV and break it when I see how the brainless 24-hour news channels debate the undebatable.

There's a difference between fact-based objectivity and giving equal time to competing idealogues. But 24-hour cable shows don't want to be confused with the facts; it's much easier for the producer to book two combatants and let them go at it, the host acting as referee.

How would this courageous media approach have worked at different times during history, I wonder...

Why don't we hop in our time machine and find out?

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The time...circa mid-1930s

Anderson Cooper: Mr. Goering, there are many people in the U.S. who believe your policies toward the Jews are cruel and unfair.

Hermann Goering: Jews are responsible for virtually every social ill in Germany; this is documented fact. We are simply protecting our country, which was on the verge of collapse before the Nazi Party came to power.

Cooper: Mr. Bonhoeffer, you have a different perspective?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Goering and his Nazi Party are making scapegoats of the Jews. Jews represent a tiny percentage of the German population; how can they possibly be responsible for all of the country's problems? The Nazis have a hateful agenda that will ultimately consume us all.

Goering: This man is lying, which is especially shameful because he claims to be a man of God. He knows that the Jews controlled the Social Democratic Party, and this is exactly the kind of disproportionate, harmful influence that the Nazi Party was formed to combat.

Bonhoeffer: Yes, I AM a man of God, and your party has forced our church undergrou...

Cooper: I'm sorry, that's all the time we have. Thank you both for sharing your opinions here tonight.
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Speaking of Goering, he said this at the Nuremberg Trials:

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

We never learn, do we? And in our loud-mouthed, media-sanctioned tit-for-tat that passes for intelligent debate today, we never will.