President Obama Removes Politics from Science by Adding More Politics to Science
Here’s an interesting headline from today’s Washington Post.
Obama Aims to Shield Science From Politics
I’d say his aim is off a bit.
The Post is being terribly deceptive in reporting what the White House says the President will do as opposed to what his order will really do.
If the President really wanted to pull politics out of science, he’d do that. He could end all public funding for scientific endeavors that would do all the shielding he could ever want. If he shut down NASA, the CDC, the FDA, AMRIID, NIST and every other government body that funds or directly engages in scientific study or approves private scientific efforts tomorrow, he could credibly claim to have divorced science and politics. But he won’t do that. There is way too much money at stake, some of which is in the form of some very nice campaign contributions.
The truth is, politics and science have always been intertwined and they always will be. Any time we spent so much as a dime on science, we have to make a political decision. Actually, we have to make more than one political decision. First we have to decide to spend public money on the endeavor, then we have to decide how much money to spend, then we have to decide what restrictions, if any, will accompany that money.
I count three political decisions right there and I dramatically oversimplified the process. There are, quite literally, hundreds of political decisions made every time we spend tax money on anything. Adding a few more layers of bureaucracy to make sure that the bureaucracy doesn’t interfere is simply silly. You don’t counteract government meddling with more government meddling; you simply get rid of the government meddlers.
What the President did today was the exact opposite of what the Washington Post said he did. I understand why they did it. It’s become a popular fiction that President Bush tried to ban the scientific method, declared Pi equal to 3, and stuffed more hemlock down the dead gullet of Socrates. The MSM, Washington Post included, did more than any left-wing group to push that story for eight years. But no matter what stories you read, it’s no more true that Bush politicized science any more than it’s true that today President Obama depoliticized it.
Other Posts of Interest:
- If You Think Bush Was Anti-Science, Wait Until You See This Guy
- The Obama Admininstration vs. Science
- Obama to Close Gitmo…One of These Days
Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., President Barack Obama, The Good Old US of A
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