What you don't know won't hurt us

Courtesy of today’s New York Times...

“Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.”

In my later days at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the place was led by a physicist named John Marburger. Who now has the most ridiculous job in America: science advisor to George W. Bush. (Kinda like being etiquette advisor to Genghis Khan.) Are we to take Bush seriously when he suddenly starts talking about strengthening science in America? The guy who takes pride in his indifference to education? Yeah, right. Straight from the White House archive:

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate the Secretary of Energy joining me today. He's a good man, he knows a lot about the subject, you'll be pleased to hear. I was teasing him -- he taught at MIT, and -- do you have a Ph.D.?

SECRETARY BODMAN: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, a Ph.D. (Laughter.) Now I want you to pay careful attention to this -- he's the Ph.D., and I'm the C student, but notice who is the advisor and who is the President.

A colloquy that doubtless sent shivers through millions of intelligent people all over America. "Oh, my God. Those creeps who used to knock my books on the ground when I was a kid... Those awful drunken frat boys who never had to study... One of them runs the country now. Bill Gates may own Microsoft, but this guy controls thousands of nuclear weapons!"

UPDATE: Speaking of Marburger, Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, annotates his latest appearance before Congress, available for viewing here. Evidently it wasn’t pretty.