Politics and Science in the Post-Bush World
October 12th, 2008De gustibus non est disputandum
“There’s no accounting for taste.”
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
I’m sitting here in The Bunker listening to George Soros on CNN and searching the world over for a beautiful sentence to start yet another Sunday column. Do a Google search for “beautiful sentence” just for the heck of it and check out some of the 273,000 hits.
There is no way any one reporter, writer, columnist, or blogger can please everybody, as evidenced by the Latin phrase above and the diversity of publications out there in Webland. But just maybe, if your intention is pure, you can please some of the people some of the time.
So let’s talk a little politics and some science.
With only three weeks to go before we finally get to vote in this incessant, way-too-long presidential race, I want to write something that will add something to the discussion. I suspect, however, that everything has already been said that would matter and most people know how they are going to vote by now.
I want to get past this election and know that George W. Bush — our C-student, frat boy, king-in-chief — is gone from American politics forever.
Some writers are so afraid of Bush and Cheney and Rove that they think we will not have an election, or that it will be stolen and Sarah Palin will be in charge of the new police state.
Sarah Palin: Head of the Coming Police State?
I am going to stand with Obama for another week and hold out some “hope” that we will somehow make it through to the other side and the free world will not come to an end. Not that I am altogether confident that this is the case. It’s just that’s the only sensible position to take short of suicide : )
After this election, I want to get back to covering some interesting issues in science, since no matter what color the next president happens to be, we must get back to thinking about science instead of bashing it and allowing religion to control our politics. That is unless we want America to become the world’s backwater of dead political ideals.
Which means Sarah Palin cannot be vice president. And if that must be true, then John McCain can’t be the next president.
Even Karl Rove’s computer hacker buddies who know how to steal elections must realize this. Unless they are complete Turd Blossoms, which is possible. But since I know they love to read and hate this blog, I offer this up as a warning. Don’t steal it guys. You’ve done enough damage already. Let the voters decide this time.
Bush should never have been elected in the first place, and of course many people think he wasn’t. But not enough to stop him from moving into the White House. Once there, he should never have been reelected in 2004. Maybe he stole that one too, who knows?
Sure the oil company and insurance company executives got wildly rich in the Bush years. But if the people were really in charge of this democracy, that could be changed pretty easily. Maybe the problem is the press, which is clinging to its wealth in the “end times” for the printing press.
If we really had a liberal press in this country, the whackos that Rove has been sending to McCain-Palin rallies lately would hold far less sway in this country. The reason is that TV reporters get most of their news from newspapers, still. And all they want is for little old ladies who go to church to like them so they can win in the ratings. So they become an echo chamber for the fears and prejudices of people who lack a sound education.
If the educated minority in this country wanted to change things badly enough, they could. There is evidence it’s happening.
Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort
And there is some evidence that the local press in Alabama has heard our call for more coverage of science here, although their first stab at it shows they lack the expertise to pull it off. In fact, the Newhouse press in Alabama got scooped by The New York Times this week, in more ways than one.
Look at this example and tell me who does better reporting — and writes a more beautiful sentence.
From the Sunday Birmingham News:
UAB scientists searching for cancer cures and Huntsville engineers designing rockets to carry Americans back to the moon are hoping a new president will reverse the erosion of federal spending for science and research and keep the government’s current commitments to rockets and missiles.
That sentence reminds me of a series in The Decatur Daily in 1986 that ran under the headline: “The Good and Bad News On Browns Ferry,” a series that talked about how a nuclear plant in North Alabama caught on fire and almost melted down and never produced a single kilowatt hour of power. In other words, there was no good news. But you know newspapers. There’s two sides to every story. Right.
Compare the News lede sentence to this one in today’s New York Times.
They huddled in a quiet corner at the US Airways lounge at Ronald Reagan National Airport, sipping bottomless cups of coffee as they plotted to turn America’s missile defense program into a personal cash machine.
As Bush would say, in other words, the Times exposed the corruption going on in Alabama in the search for federal dollars in defense contracts, in a readable news feature, while the News promotes the idea of bringing more research “pork” dollars to the state in one big long piece of public relations.
One is journalism. The other is PR. Choose the style you prefer.
And then let’s go a step further into blogland, where we can go where no editorial bureaucracy has ever gone before.
It just so happens I studied under the political science professor at the University of Alabama who was largely responsible for getting then-President Ronald Reagan to go after a missile defense shield in the early 1980s, Donald Snow.
He published a book called Nuclear Strategy In A Dynamic World in 1981, and another called The Last Frontier: An Analysis of the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1986.
But he was wrong about a lot of things, including a prediction that we would go through a series of one-term presidents after Reagan, and that Bush would lose the election in 2004 if he went to war with Iraq.
Educated Guesses 2003 — Predictions from UA Experts
War Against Iraq would Cost Bush Re-Election
President George W. Bush will lose his bid for re-election if the United States goes to war in 2003 against Iraq, predicts a University of Alabama expert in military and political affairs. Dr. Donald Snow, professor of political science at UA, places the likelihood of a 2003 war with Iraq at 2:1 in favor of a military strike. “If we go to war with Iraq, it will cost George W. Bush the election in 2004,” Snow said. “Even if the war itself goes well, the post-war will not, and that’s what’s going to do him in. “Post-War Iraq is going to be an extraordinarily messy place that we are going to have to occupy for a long time,” said Snow. “We will become the recruiting poster for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.”
Well, he got that last part right. But as I have been saying for so long I am tired of saying it, a missile defense shield will not work. It only got us into trouble in Georgia recently, when we almost ended up in a real war with Russia because of it.
And The New York Times shows how the program just becomes another source for corrupt defense contracts to waste your tax money. The Birmingham News story shows that in a backwater, red state, even the newspaper editors and publishers want the corruption to continue because it props up the economy — and they can keep making a fine living wasting all those trees and paper and ink.
The good news is Bush will be gone soon.
Long live the Web Press!
