Bush suppressing science...at NASA!

If you thought FEMA's Michael Brown was Bush's worst case of cronyism, you're wrong. Ol' Dubya's topped himself. And this time he got a two-fer. By putting in a totally unworthy person as NASA's public relations official, he also gets to manipulate and suppress valuable scientific information from one of the world's leading science organizations.

NASA scientists are outraged that George Deutsch, the crony in question, has interfered to "alter, filter, or adjust" the content of their messages. (Check the details here, but quickly before the NY Times archives it.) The gist is this: Deutsch is twisting the language to favor Bush's arch-conservative/pro-fundamentalist Christian world view. In other words, it's the Dark Ages again at NASA.

So who is this Deutsch guy that Bush appointed to NASA? Apparently, a total nobody. (Check out this blog's research on the guy.) He's a college dropout who wrote a bunch of right-wing gibberish for the school paper (such as claiming that the ties between Saddam and Al Qaida were so "clear" that it was obvious Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks)--and that's it. The closest he ever came to writing about science is a few video game articles. But he worked on Bush's campaign, so that makes him "qualified."

We're in a fight for the very fabric of our society. The GOP is hell-bent to twist every fact into an opinion and every opinion into a fact. They want to keep us so disinformed that we are totally manipulatable--that we don't can't even formulate questions, let alone understand answers. This way, their machine keeps chugging along. We keep doing all the work that makes them rich and powerful, including dying in foreign wars so they can rake in "record profits."

America was headed in the overall right direction before November 2000. Now we're at the edge of a cliff. And Dubya's happy to provide a push...