Mike Huckabee blames the school massacre in Connecticut on removing prayer from public schools. Really, Mike? God brings judgment on a nation by killing 6 and 7 year-olds with an assault rifle? Interesting God you serve. Or maybe you’re just drawing a totally obvious cause-and-effect?

During my lifetime, I’ve heard all kinds of societal ills blamed on that 1963 Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. It’s the reason for the divorce rate, crime, drugs, the crisis du jour. But why stop there? Let’s also blame 1963 for Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the debt crisis, Justin Bieber, low voting rates, declining church attendance, MS Windows, teen pregnancy, AIDS, poor math scores, illegal immigration, and the Macarena. And if we go off the fiscal cliff, let’s blame that on the lack of school prayer, too.

That way, we can blame everything on something that happened in 1963, rather than on our own present-day irresponsibility.

The school massacre is all about school prayer. It has nothing to do with guns or mental illness.

This is a mesmerizing time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions–all but two of them tests–since 1945. It really picks up in the 1960s. You see an icon for each country as they begin testing–first the US, then Russia, followed by England, France, China, and finally Pakistan–with a running total for each country (about half of the explosions were done by the US). It’s about 15 minutes long, but fascinating. You see where each explosion occurred (lots in the South Pacific by the US and France).

The Atlantic contains a riveting account of what really happened in Benghazi. It’s the verbatim briefing of a State Department official who talked to the various people involved. He sets the context, and then gives a blow-by-blow, and very detailed, account of the entire episode. You can also read the entire briefing, with Q&A from reporters.

The article gave me a whole different view of the event–and a much more believable, and certainly more credible, account than what we’ve heard. There were some heroic acts by our security personnel. A daring drive through Benghazi streets. Our security people were outnumbered, but they were not unarmed. And there was plenty of confusion. Ambassador Stevens simply got lost in the mayhem, and the repeated attempts by security personnel to find him failed. But he was probably already dead in the safe room.

Right-wing media groups have said that Ambassador Stevens was tortured and sodomized. That didn’t happen. The torture information came from the Libyan Free Press, a pro-Kadaffi group, and has been repeated by a Republican congressman from Arizona. Stevens actually died of smoke inhalation, as initially reported. This account makes that pretty clear.

I don’t know why the right-wing media accepts stuff like this so easily. They’ll tell you, “Here’s what the mainstream media won’t tell you.” But the reason the mainstream wasn’t reporting this is because IT DIDN’T HAPPEN. I’m dismayed that FoxNews considers a pro-Kadaffy website to be authoritative. At least the “lamestream” media has more discretion than that.

I have read and heard so much nonsense about this event.

As the State Department briefing shows, it was a very sudden attack by armed men. Al Qaeda? Maybe. The White House should have gotten its story straight–they definitely bungled it–but this is a story with lots of murkiness.

The Pew Research Center asked people four questions to determine their knowledge of current events:

1. Which party controls the House of Representatives?
2. What’s the current unemployment rate?
3. What nation does Angela Merkel lead?
4. Which presidential candidate favors taxing higher-income Americans?

Seem like pretty basic, easy questions to me. However:

• Only 14% of the general public got all four questions right. (Seriously? Those are easy questions.)
• About 17% got all four questions wrong.
• Rachel Maddow’s audience did the best: 38% got all four right.
• Readers of the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Economist all placed above 30%.
• MSNBC viewers did better (21%) than the audiences of Rush Limbaugh (19%), CNN (17%), and Fox News (16%). This affirms other studies I’ve heard which show that Fox News viewers tend to be ill informed (try this, this, this, this, and this for example). But note to MSNBC: 21% ain’t nothin’ to brag about.
• USA Today readers and viewers of the network evening news coming in last at 15%. That kind of surprises me. I only read USA Today when I’m traveling, so I picture USA Today readers as well-traveled folk. But maybe they just read the entertainment section.

So how did people answer the questions?

• 54% knew that Republicans controlled the House.
• 52% knew the unemployment rate was about 8%.
• 22% knew Angela Merkel led Germany.
• 66% knew that Obama was more supportive of increasing taxes on the wealthy.

And these are the people who will be–yes, ever so, uh, thoughtfully–electing our next president.

What would I do?

I’m an ambassador in a city thousands of miles from home. I’m surrounded by angry, fanatical Muslims shouting things like “Death to America,” and I know they can easily breech our walls. I’m responsible for a bunch of staffers, who fear for their lives and are depending on me. The local police are doing nothing. We’re obviously cut off from help and totally on our own.

The very LEAST I might do is think of possible ways to calm the crowd down. Maybe tell the demonstrators, “You know that movie you’re upset about? We didn’t like it either. We didn’t have anything to do with it.”

And if someone wearing a suit in an air-conditioned room, surrounded by security agents, wants to tell me I’m apologizing for America, I could live with that.

What would you do?

[Note: I posted this on Facebook, and there has been quite a bit of interaction.]