NAME MATCHES OPINION

Saturday's Springfield News-Leader has the best damned letter to the editor in recent history. We say "recent history" because once upon a time, the Saturday paper published unsigned LTTEs, and anonymous broadsides are always much more delightful.

But today's letter about so-called intelligent design gives us a double blast of hilarity. First, it's written by someone who actually believes intelligent design os a valid scientific theory. Second, it's written by a guy named Paul Tardo.

(Normally, we find it beneath us to poke fun at someone's name. That said, when Bob Torp ran for state lawmaker last year, we were the first to say a guy named Torp couldn't win. We were right.)

Mr. Tardo opines on the value of Jonathon Wells, an anti-evolutionist who was educated by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

You know -- Moonies. Here's what Wells has to say about Moon:

Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.

Mr. Tardo doesn't seem to care (or know) about the Moonie connection; he's all hung up on Wells having a "double Ph.D." and thus being smarter than everyone else. That sort of thinking is quite retarded.