#386: Cal Thomas

Cal Thomas is an American conservative syndicated columnist, pundit, author and radio commentator. He is a panelist on Fox News Watch, a Fox program criticizing liberals in the media (he used to host After Hours with Cal Thomas), and has written 10 books, including “Blinded By Might”, where he presented his take on the role of Falwell’s Moral Majority in American politics of the 1980s (Thomas was vice president of the Moral Majority back then).

When Clinton addressed the Human Rights Campaign, suggesting that gay people are human, Thomas reacted with condemnation: “God designed norms for behavior that are in our best interests. When we act outside those norms – such as for premarital sex, adultery, or homosexual sex – we cause physical, emotional, and spiritual damage to ourselves and to our wider culture. The unpleasant consequences of divorce and sexually transmitted diseases are not the result of intolerant bigots seeking to denigrate others. They are the result of violating God's standards, which were made for our benefit,” and so it goes. More on Cal Thomas and ze gays here.

He weighed in heavily on the healthcare reform, claiming that the left wanted to kill of old people because leftists believe in evolution – indeed, he claimed that the healthcare reform bill came about as a “consequences of attempting to ban people with a God perspective from the public square”. And then he invoked Hitler, of course. You can read more on Thomas's views on atheism here. His points aren’t generally recognized as particularly good by those who are able to distinguish reason from incoherent babble. You can read Thomas on the Bible here. His ideas are strangely reminiscent of the Conservapedia Bible Project. Isn't it weird that the Bible always comes out supporting whatever position wingnuts like Thomas are already committed to? (It really isn't.)

In a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) study from Hamilton (full text here) Cal Thomas was deemed the “worst prognosticator” among all pundits surveyed in the study by far, loosing even to Lindsey Graham by a mile. In fact, the study concluded that “[r]eaders could literally gain insight by believing the opposite of what they read in his weekly columns. Of his 15 predictions, 13 were wrong, one was hedged, and only one was correct.”

Diagnosis: Smugly inane God-walloper who is completely – and demonstrably – fully out of touch with reality (the accuracy of his guesses about what the world is like being far, far worse than chance).