Let the Blood Games continue.
Only weeks after election 2012 and years before election 2016, in a routine interview, a glossy pop magazine popped Florida Senator Marco Rubio with an oddball question: How old do you think the earth is? Rubio responded a bit clumsily and noncommittally. Smelling blood and opportunity, the wolf pack bared fangs and chased.
Their game is either to force Rubio to affirm a personal belief the earth is 4.5 billion years old—disturbing some of his religious supporters--or to mock and stigmatize him and others who could harbor any delusional uncertainty—damaging him with a different part of the electorate. 
The snarling pack imposes a totalitarian demand: No matter whether you’re intelligent, you engage the real world, you offer solutions to problems, and you attract and persuade citizens to support your vision and solutions; the pack demands to know if you have any hidden reserves of unsavory, illogical faith. Deny it or be tarred and marginalized.
The pack’s position, stretched to its logical end, amounts to demanding that politicians reject belief in God’s divinity and supremacy. That is, it countenances loyalty only to a god who exercises no will or power beyond passively upholding the principles set forth in Science 101.
Before reflecting why that is necessarily so, consider some of the other malignancies exposed by this flare up.
First is the premeditated bad faith of an upscale publication. The random question is untethered  from public policy, from issues in the US Senate, or measures Rubio might pursue. It arose from a singular goal unrelated to reporting current events: GQ wanted to conjure a killer question, something that might damage a popular potential GOP presidential candidate.  It’s easy to imagine the query came from a group brainstorm over lunch: “Think, people…how can we trip him?!”
Second on the list is the poisonous effect of unresting, perpetual attack machinery.  Scarcely had the interview hit GQ’s website and newsstands when it ricocheted across the blogosphere and commentariat, with sneers from the left and defenses from the right. Barack Obama is two months shy of putting his hand on the Bible for a second term. Yet, already an anticipated candidate for 2016 is under manufactured attack for how he might read that book’s teachings.
GQ forced the exchange, the left media took up the cudgel, and then a celebrity hack of liberal economics at the Grey Lady weighed