Intelligent Design?

Here is a reprint of an especially funny bit from yesterday's "Best of the Web". (You do read it every day... don't you?):

Waddle They Think of Next?
So we went to see "March of the Penguins" over the weekend, and we found it a delightful opus. Like most Hollywood fare, "March" tells a story about peculiar mating rituals. What makes it unusual is that it is about penguins rather than human beings.

Apparently there's a debate going on about the political subtext of the movie. We haven't really been following it, and we didn't find it especially political, but we guess--spoiler alert!--it's probably about whether the movie advocates feminism (because male penguins brood the eggs while the females are off fishing) or family values (because penguins are monogamous, albeit only for a year at a time).

It strikes us, though, that if there's a message here it is in favor of natural selection and against "intelligent design." Penguins' means of living and reproducing involves repeated, sexually segregated 70-mile treks through unimaginably bitter cold to get food. Those monogamous penguin couples hardly get to see each other, and when they are together, they spend much of their time trying to transfer the egg from female to male, a clumsy maneuver that can easily yield a frozen embryo. Whichever parent is tending to the chick at any given time is starving to death while the other one is off at sea.

Granted, it all seems to work somehow--but if this is intelligent design, the designer is Rube Goldberg.

Meanwhile, Lloyd Grove of the New York Daily News reports on another forthcoming documentary, "Inside the Bubble," which is about John Kerry's 2004 campaign:

People who've screened the documentary say it's compelling and revealing. It features, among other not-ready-for-prime-time moments, [Hillary] Clinton scowling and rolling her eyes over an apparent Kerry gaffe during a presidential debate; Kerry pretending to interview himself and babbling in Italian while waiting for a real interview to begin; Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) cursing at reporters during a campaign stop, and Kerry message guru Robert Shrum confidently declaring a few days before the 2004 election: "Zogby [a prominent pollster] just announced who's gonna win. Us!" . . .

A press release claims the movie--which won't be shown publicly until Thursday--"turns a harsh but deeply revealing mirror on the campaign . . . a disorganized, contentious, self-absorbed team that thought they could win by 'not making mistakes,' and keeping their candidate in the public eye without clarifying a position on anything."

It doesn't sound as though the Kerry campaign provides much evidence of intelligent design either.