I just came across this Salon.com "Dear Wingnut" piece, written by a pseudonymous conservative, who in this installment tries to defend the Republican record on science. It's pretty audacious stuff, either completely uninformed about the true nature of the critiques of the GOP that I and others have made, or willing to dodge them entirely. And to top it off, the piece goes out with a whack at mainstream climate science. Wingnuttery indeed. Here's a brief example of what we're dealing with:
As president, George W. Bush put a scientist in charge of the Energy Department and created the position of U.S. undersecretary of science; proposed an Advanced Energy Initiative that called for a quantum increase in funding available for research into and development of new, cutting-edge technologies to lead America to more abundant and stable energy supplies; and proposed the American Competitiveness Initiative to, in the words of former Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman, "fortify America's leadership in science through additional research funding in the physical sciences and by strengthening math and science education." House Republicans, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, proposed doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health and dramatically increased federal financial support for the fight against diabetes. And it was Bush who tried to put a risk-averse NASA back into the business of space exploration by proposing a return to the moon and manned flight to Mars.
All of which ignores the real charges against Bush, laid out in my book The Republican War on Science and elsewhere. Also in that book, I present the real and non-caricatured case against Gingrich, which turns on the dismantling of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment on his watch, and the constant attacks by Gingrich Republicans on mainstream science on issues like global warming and ozone depletion. And then there's the Wingnut's evasive defense of the Bush stem cell record:
To set the record straight, George W. Bush was the first president to propose federal funding for stem cell research. As Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said in August of 2004, "President Bush provided -- for the first time -- federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. The president's unprecedented decision allows for federal funding of research using existing stem cell lines that were derived before Aug. 9, 2001, with no limits on private funding of research." Not exactly an anti-science position, is it? To the extent that limitations were placed on federal funding, it was because of the ethics involved, not the science. Acting on the recommendation of a blue-ribbon commission that looked at the issue for some time, the president decided it would be unethical -- in the moral sense, not the legal one -- to act as those who believe embryonic stem cell research holds the cure to everything that ails us would have had him do.
Bush got the science dramatically wrong about the number of embryonic stem cell lines that would be available for research under his policy, and their scientific promise and viability. He therefore misled the public about a matter purely scientific in nature, and the error was so serious that it fully undermined his policy. And Bush never set the record straight or revised said policy. Wingnut does not mention any of this. I could go on, but why? It's been abundantly clear for some time that most conservatives who seek to refute claims about a Republican "war on science" don't actually take the real charges head on. Maybe it's too much intellectual work--or maybe they just can't.
