What's the problem with having a president who was a "C" student? He wants the rest of us to be even less average. In testimony before Congress last week, former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona said that the Bush administration has an adversarial relationship with science.
"Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointee's ideological, theological or political agenda is often ignored, marginalized or simply buried," Carmona said. "The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is noothing worse than ignoring science or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds."
This is a common criticism of the Bush administration, made most throroughly in journalist Chris Mooney's 2005 book, The Republican War on Science. When it comes to issues such as global warming, stem cell research or the teaching of evolution-the argument goes-the White House adopts what you might call a "fath-based" approach to science, not an approach grounded in empiricism. This is Bush in a nutshell. When it comes to the word of the Almighty versus that pesky science, he'll take the Almighty. After all, He's on the Republicans' side, right?
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