Jon Swift and
PZ Myers fisk a neoconservative nutcase, which saves me from having to link directly to the koolaid drinker du jour:
Jon Swift--Recently there was some controversy when the Bush Administration accidentally left off evolution from a list of subjects eligible for government grants--whoops! But Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush has an even better suggestion: That we just leave off science altogether. The debate between Evolution and Intelligent Design, he says, "got me thinking, and today ii [sic] occured [sic] to me: science is dead. We have reached the end of the Age of Science."
I recommend you do not read the actual post on the Blogs for Bush site (That Jon is referring to1), unless you're a masochist. The rant goes downhill from there, some of the comments are worse. The dingbat author's thesis is that science is 'dead,' that in fact science has been 'dead' since roughly 1850. Nothing to see here folks, ignore relativity and the atomic bomb, refuse that useless antibiotic and don't look at that flat-screen ...
Witty snarkisms aside, for rational conservative and centrist readers: I understand we may have profoundly fundamental differences in some matters of ideology, but I hope we can agree that this kind of shit is dangerous when and if it infects the powers that be. If the Blogs for Bush guy was just a lone wolf hysterically barking at the moon, it might be funny, it might be sad. Problem is, Bush and Rumsfeld and James Dobson and a third of the nation are out there with their eyes fully dilated yelping at the night sky with him.
Creating fake science, muzzling the real article, denying or lying to yourself and others, and erecting obstacles to the flow of empirical data at the highest levels of governance, is about the last thing an advanced technological nation needs. It's a surefire way to get a bunch of innocent people killed. Clusterfucks like Iraq or bungled responses to disasters like Katrina are mild compared to what could happen. That head-in-the-sand, "I'm a stupid moron now with 100% more wingnuttery" approach was never very appealing. It is utterly useless when dealing with items like solar flares or hurricanes, or for that matter, terrorism or warfare. Any field where, at least partially, legit science and objective analysis counts.
If you don't like sleeping naked in the dirt and bashing open pig skulls with a stone hand-ax, until you keel over from old age or kidney stones before your fortieth birthday, science is the breath of life. If you want to keep breathing, you might have to vote against the Republicans, or just not vote at all.