In what in my opinion ranks among the most predictably tedious, warmed over State of the Union performances ever televised, one glaring tidbit from tonight's rendition demands I throw something up here right now (And I mean that viscerally as well as metaphorically). I would have thought it was parody had I not seen it with my own eyes: George W. Bush publicly wringing his hands about our dependence on foreign oil as well as the sorry state of math and science education in the US. It almost sounded to me like any day now, the President will saddle up the wild bucking bronco of research and single-handedly ride it to the
alternative energy rescue. Yippee-yi-yay!
The President was right about one thing though: We are losing our edge in science and technology. Maybe that's due in large part to the current Republican body politic, which has been leading the vicious charge against science in every way for years on end, including science funding, biology, climate science, K-12 public science ed, and stem cell research just to name a few areas? Chris Mooney hits the nail on the head:
[Link] They think science is great, except when its results conflict with the pet interests of some particular constituency. But if you sell out scientific knowledge too frequently for political gain, people are going to question your sincerity the next time you try to explain how important science is to the nation. That's Bush's conundrum, and I frankly don't see how he's going to find a convincing way out of it.
Just for grisly starters, do the right-wing spin-meisters think we've forgotten what cabal it was that grotesquely wired up an unconscious Terry Schiavo to a puppeteer's cross and shamelessly paraded her across the national stage like a marionette? What caucus was it that compounded a family's personal tragedy, in diametric defiance of a mountain of medical science data and an overwhelming consensus, for a few photo-ops playing to an unpopular, fringe, constituency?
You can fool thirty-something percent of the people all of the time. But it's also apparent from the same data you can't successfully fool most of the public for more than a few years. And it's been obvious virtually from the get-go they can't fool the vast majority of scientists for any length of time.
[CNN] The Union of Concerned Scientists contended in a report that "the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented."
I'd be thrilled to see more emphasis on physical science, mathematics, education, and research orchestrated at the highest levels of Federal Government. But in my view, whenever there's been the slightest potential to waffle between science and appeasing the Republican funding or fundamentalist bases in the past, George Bush and the Republican controlled Congress have opted for the soft money and the votes of extremists. In short, the way I see it, if the White House or the GOP thinks they have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the 'science and math party' without spending some serious dough and reversing themselves on a whole slew of policy issues, they're even more cut off from reality than I feared.
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