“Science” a Dirty Word?

Posted by jns on 29 March 2005

Behold the British Press, willing to say what the American Media apparently prefer not to mention:

For Bush, science is a dirty word
In America’s right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism

Admittedly, the piece was written by Tristram Hunt, a visiting professor of history at Arizona State University. Is it significant that his opinion was published not in America?
I’ll quote the thesis, and then suggest that you read the rest — it’s got too much good writing about really bad things.

Thanks to the policies and prejudices of the Bush administration, science has become a dirty word. The American century was built on scientific progress. From the automobile to the atom bomb to the man on the moon, science and technology underpinned American military, commercial and cultural might. Crucial to that was the presidency. From FDR and the Los Alamos laboratory to Kennedy and Nasa to Clinton and decoding the genome, the White House was vital to promoting ground-breaking research and luring the world’s scientific elite. But Bush’s faith-based, petro-chemical administration has reversed that tradition: excepting matters military, this presidency exhibits an abiding aversion to scientific inquiry that is in danger of affecting the entire country.