The Obama administration's War on Science

Remember all the pious declarations from the Obama administration about how they were going to restore scientific integrity to the government decision-making process after it was supposedly threatened during the Bush administration? And remember the amens and halleluiahs that came from the anti-Intellectual Design crowd and people like P. Z. Myers? Turns out it was all a hoax, and all the healings of science policy that were supposed to happen have been exposed as fraudulent.

So says Victor Davis Hanson in a new article entitled, "The New War on Reason" Here's Hanson on the Obama administrations labor statistics trick:

Over the last nine months, the official government website Recovery.gov has informed us how the stimulus has saved jobs — even as hard data reflected the unpleasant truth of massive and spiraling job losses.

... Thus mythical congressional districts were posted on an official government website with more fanciful data of “jobs saved.” Just as creationists insist that the world was made 6,000 years ago, so too the Obamians believe that joblessness must show a decline because their messianic leader says it’s so — bothersome facts be damned. In this current Orwellian climate, a scientific document listing the latest unemployment figures is the equivalent of a stegosaurus footprint — an inconvenient truth for the upbeat employment gospel according to St. Barack.

Here's Hanson on CO2 emissions and the Obama administration's obsession with wind and solar energy and corresponding lack of interest in nuclear energy, which could help solve the problem:

These controversies could be adjudicated through substantive debate, but instead politically correct hysteria again has followed. “Good” informed people — like those who adhered to every doctrine of the medieval church — “know” the planet is heating up, thanks to the greed of carbon-based industry. “Bad” heretics challenge official environmental dogma and exegesis. In such an anti-empirical age, if the “truther” Van Jones had not been there, ready for Obama to tap as green czar, he would have had to be invented.

And finally Hanson on Al Gore's self-dealing on Global Warming, and various other assorted nonsense that threatens the integrity of science but that none of the people who regularly sermonize on the topic are interested in discussing:

In short, we are witnessing the rise of a new deductive, anti-scientific age.

Instead of Christian, southern-twanged fundamentalists, we see instead kinder, gentler federal bureaucrats, globetrotting Ph.D.s, liberal hucksters, and politically correct diversity officers.

All are committed to the medieval fallacy that exalted theoretical ends justify very real tawdry means.

The result is the triumph of superstition, and the dethronement of science.

Read more here.

HT: Cranach.