In an interview with the Washington Examiner in December 2011 that is remarkable for the level of confusion he demonstrated, Mitt Romney took time from explaining his passion for science to give a shout-out to the University of Utah for its embarrassing excursion into the realms of pathological science, where essentially all researchers have relegated this topic.
The rest of the interview is worth looking over for other examples of Mr. Romney's fuzzy thinking - for example on his tax plan ("You want to know precisely what the plan looks like and I have not laid out that plan..."), justification of the Massachusetts health program as a tax dodge ("they actually got to pay in pre-tax dollars. So the exchange one, made it tax advantageous, and number two, it gave people access to insurance") and other characteristic Romney features that are so easy to recognize ("Oh, and my favorite thing, I can fire them if I don't like them"). But the thing that jumps out to any scientist is the astonishing lack of understanding he has of the things he says he is trying to advocate.
I'll demonstrate with this unvarnished quote -- and I'll warn you, if you have any training in or understanding of or even sympathy for how science works, you'd better be sitting down:
I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with -- with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.
How anyone could vote for a person who would express such thoughts as those above as a candidate for ANY high office absolutely escapes me.
