Ah, yes. Science...

Well, Bush, I wish you'd take a look at this terrific analysis of your science-related programs by Tristram Hunt in the Guardian Unlimited. Most recently, you blithely trashed years' worth of medical science in your eagerness to exploit the Terri Schiavo case for your political gain. But your favoring of the blathering of those who promote such religious extremist junk science as "creationism" over the work and study of serious, conscientious scientists has been going on ever since you took office.

What is it about us Americans (well, this particular one is only naturalized) that tolerates your blatant scrapping of inconvenient facts when they don't fit your agenda, your riding roughshod over our deteriorating environment, your obstruction of scientifc and medical investigation that could lead to the saving of countless of those lives you claim to hold so precious? I wonder if you actually believe the nonsense that your supporters propagate? Or whether you simply feel obliged to sacrifice your better judgment to political necessity?

Even the military, it seems, is not to be spared the ravages of your disregard for objective scientific evidence: your blinkered support for the Star Wars program continues unabated, regardless its continuing disastrous failures. And you opt for a mission to the Moon and Mars while Hubble, that great treasure that has brought us endless streams of glorious information, is to be left to languish up there in the stratosphere.

Is willful ignorance, then, to be celebrated? Elevated? The scandalous, escalating neglect of our education system, perhaps especially in the sciences--no, not true: I take that back. I used to teach in the humanities at university level, and the mindlessness and illiteracy of students arriving from the high schools was already reaching crisis levels forty years ago--this penny-pinching, misbogtten neglect will eventually yield its inevitable results. Already countries like India and China are far surpassing us in the education of scientific and technological minds.

So tell me, how can you stand by, Bush, presiding over this disaster? The bottom line of everything you say and do, it seems to me, is personal and corporate profit. Are these the American values that you tout so freely?