After reading this by Alan Grayson, I would like to expand upon the comment I made which was:
He is risking his very soul running for congress
imagine being the only one in the room that understood the science, it would be soul destroying having to listen to the drivel coming out of congress every day.
I'm a Chemical Engineer and own a tiny design company where we model combustion and hydraulic systems, there are just three of us me, a mathematician and a programmer. We have a number of clients that we have been working together with for a few years now.
I know how the stuff fits together on site what risk assessments and standards are applicable to the job at hand. We develop the model together and present it to the clients engineers and researchers. We then get a go or no go based on the data and finances available.
If go we work with the contractors and site engineers to build and install the equipment, then commission and fine tune. Everyone knows what everyone else needs to be doing and in general professionalism is shown even when things do not go ahead as planned, we do tend to use some quite colorful language to get our points across. However the aim of everyone involved is not for some of us to throw a monkey wrench in the project whilst the others try to catch it before damage is done,
Once the project is completed we hold a training course for the site and maintenance engineers who will keep the system running smoothly, at no point do any of these people complain about the color of the plant. If something does go wrong they know we will be there to help as soon as is possible, sometimes the distances can be quite large.
Politics seems to run in completely the opposite direction, a number of people who no nothing about how things work invite a number of people that do to present the data to them. They then seem to ignore the data completely and give orders to a number of people to come up with the project definition. Meanwhile the other side are busy throwing monkey wrenches.
They then have a committee meeting and vote on what they believe without sometimes even knowing what is in the project plan. They then tell another group of people to get on with applying the plan, then lawyers seem to get involved in finding holes in the plan that they can work around. The other side rather than pitching in sits on there backsides and say "told you it wouldn't work; just ignore those wrenches".
Going back a little, I was in a senior position within a GE division, however I found the company stiffing and limiting with far too much procedure and not enough action. I didn't sit there and complain, I left and decided to work in my own way and found others to compliment this system. Some like the corporate system and good luck to them and I never had any complaints about GE itself as an employee.
I would never dream on telling other specialists how to do their job and expect the same professional courtesy in return, there can still be heated arguments but on a purely technical foundation. Congress seems to ignore the data and just crash right on through any specialists reasoning. Imagine standing up in a project meeting saying you don't believe and being unable to prove why. gosh that would be silly, yet that seems to be the go to response in congress. A group of lawyers and businessmen [mainly] splitting hairs over the data based on a non provable theories [politics/religion] would drive me up the wall, I might even resort to colorful language and throw a text book at them.
I enjoy peer review by people in the same field what I wont stand for is peer review by someone who has not a clue but a pile of beliefs founded upon political expediency. I wouldn't ask a geneticist to design a reactor cooling system and I sure as hell wouldn't tell them how the humane genome is arranged.
No politics would send me either loopy or homicidal.