In John Kasich’s Fox News show this evening he interviewed a guest named Bob Cornuke. Cornuke is a former police officer turned con artist (with a mail-order “PhD”) who specializes in “discovering” Biblical sites and artifacts and such as the “real” Mt. Sinai and the anchors from St. Paul’s sunken ship. Cornuke was on Kasich’s show tonight to pimp his discovery of Noah’s Ark in Iran.
Cornuke was more circumspect about the nature of his discovery than the ludicrous claims made in the linked article. The site really only amounts to little more than a cleft rock formation and some fossils indcating the site was once underwater. Cornuke was trying spin this as “possibly” being Noah’s Ark but pretended to be cautious about declaring it outright. He also burbled a lot of obfuscating bullshit about the location being corroborated by the Bible (an outright lie since Genesis says nothing at all about where the Ark supposedly landed) and laughably postures himself as a “police investigator” who “deals in probabilities.” He really just dumps out horseshit by the shovelful but that’s not so unusual or surprising. I don’t even think Cornuke believes a word he’s saying himself, he’s just scamming credulous suckers to sell books and videos.
What was more irksome to me was that John Kasich was just eating up every bit of this steaming pile of donkey shite like it was banana pudding. He asked no critical questions, kept calling Cornuke “doctor” (Cornuke is no more doctor than Julius Irving) and acted as though the video footage of perfectly ordinary and unremarkable rock formations was the news of the century. He seemed to take it for granted the Bibical story of the flood and the ark was genuine history.
So is Kasich really THAT fucking gullible and stupid or he just cynically pandering to the fundie morons in the Fox News audience to make them like him and watch his show?
Either way, Fox News just loses more credibility every day.
Wow, someone that gets under people’s skin is hosting a show on cable news? Say it ain’t so!
Sadly, I think my cynicism may have surpassed the standard-bearer. The fact you all still fall for this, in any form be it Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc, is a bit sad.
Glad we could help. Maybe a news show where they don’t even require a Ph.D. from a diploma mill before they call you doctor would be an even better idea though.
These cable “news” programs aren’t worth watching at all. It’s just like radio and a lot of internet sports writing: just opinion for the sake of opinion.
If I want some facts I’ll watch Tim Russert or Lehrer.
Fuck these silly cable primadonnas. And Nancy Grace.
Slight hijack possibly, but I was channel surfing the other night and landed on The Hystery Channel just long enough to hear “experts” and theologians discuss the “ludicrous” theory that space aliens were responsible for The Bible Code. The sickening part was that they didn’t think the Bible Code was a heaping pile of ordure, just the space alien theory.
This reminds me of Dr. Dale Griffis, another mail order Ph.D. theologian. The West Memphis Three are still in prison in Arkansas (Damien Echols on death row) in large part due to Griffis’s “expert testimony” (no DNA or blood or other remotely conclusive physical or even circumstantial evidence connected the convicted to the scene of the crime or the victims). Among his other testimonials Griffis asserted that because two of the teenagers on trial had been seen wearing black to school and had books by Stephen King at home they were incomparably more likely than almost anybody else to brutally murder three young boys (the crime for which they were on trial), and he stated that the murders occurred on a Satanic holiday (there was NO occult holiday anytime that week).
Griffis’s alma mailbox was not only never accredited, it was later ordered closed for mail fraud by the Federal government. Nevertheless his testimony was allowed to stand as he was, after all, the author of more than two dozen books on the subject (only 1 copy of which is to be found in any library anywhere- it’s a vanity press pub he donated to a law enforcement library in Ohio).
Um, News Show? Gimme Cronkite for news. Everything else is spin, entertainment and ratings gimmicks. I get the feeling we’re in agreement on this. I want news. Not news entertainment. It’s time we Dopers in so many disagreements get together on the simplest of ideals.
I want someone to tell me WHAT is happening, not WHY they think it’s happening.
Oh yeah, this is a whole new duffer, needed some time to get right
I can’t tell you how delighted I was to see your name in the “last post by” column. I hope things are well with you, and I look forward to seeing more of your posts (probably Monday – I’ve got to begin being productive around the house now).
My brain began to hurt as soon the “evidence” turned towards saying that Ararat is not the correct mountain. Duh! As I don’t think a flood as descrived in the Bible was possible, of course Ararat was the wrong place to look for, but [del]Cornholio[/del] Cornuke here thinks that there was another mountain:
Well, at least we can say that if he is right, then all those expeditions “evidence” of the ark being on Ararat all these years, was 100% bullshit.
Is the new location credible? The oldest tale of the flood came from Sumeria and the boat actually landed on Mount Nisir… did I say Mount as in Mountain? IIRC even that translation is in doubt, very likely it was not referring to a mountain, but to the more logical place a boat would land after a “thousand year flood”: a land area or country, or a sand bar; most likely at the mouth of the Euphrates River.
Yeah, we are in agreement about that. Just a few weeks ago I was channel surfing and decided to watch CNN headline news (I usually get my news from online sources like AP) and saw unbiased reporting on meaningful global events and it was the first time in a while that I remember seeing that on TV. I’ve been watching headline news almost daily since then. I’m so used to specials, editorializing, obsessing over isolated incidents (what some judge in Nebraska did, some missing white woman, etc) that I forgot true news is still out there. I need to start watching the network 6 o’clock news again.
Fox News’s criteria for “experts” will never be as ridiculous as it was during the Terri Schiavo fracas. We can’t forget the quack who claimed to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, who believed Terri could be cured with hyperbaric O2 or something equally ridiculous.
Turned out that his “nomination” consisted of his state Representative sending a letter to the Nobel committee asking for him to be considered for the “Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine”. This is ludicrously far from the actual nomination process, and IIRC, actual nominees for the award are not officially made public. Yet well after even I was aware of this, FNC continued to repeat his claim of having been nominated, not just on Hannity, but on its “legitimate” news shows.
This was around the same time that they had John Edward (the “Crossing Over” guy, aka The Biggest Douche in the Universe) on for comment on the matter. That’s when I realized that not just was Fox News a joke, but they weren’t all that interested in hiding it anymore.
CNN Headline is a good program. I feel sorry for the anchors doing the same stories twice an hour, but it’s good for the viewers. Plus, there’s always Robin Meade. She makes my mornings happier.
Taking no position on the meat of this complaint (except to say I agree he sounds pretty con-artisty) his doctorate, in divinity, was apparently conferred by Cathedral Bible College, which is apparently a real school in Myrtle Beach, SC. Why does this constitute a “mail order” PhD?
The same type of claim regarding Nobel prize nomination was made in support of Tookie Williams.
As I understand it, it’s both technically true and utterly disingenuous. Nominations can indeed be made by any elected official or by any educator in an accredited institution. Those “nominations” are winnowed drastically down before they are considered on any serious level. So to make the claim is technically true, but pretty damn useless.
This is wrong. You must have googled the wrong Cornuke or something. The Bob Cornuke I’m talking about has only a phony PhD from an unaccredited Christian correspondence school called Louisana baptist University (in what, I can’t seem to find out. Even LBU’s own website proudly lists him as an alumn but doesn’t say what field for which he was awarded a PhD). It’s a straight up diploma mill.
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