Mingle Until Departure

This is a good essay/review on the new Chris Mooney book, The Republican War on Science.” But I think it (and most of the chatter on this subject) misses a central point. There is, without a doubt, a Republican War on Science – and further, on all Enlightenment values. It is a vast right-wing conspiracy all its own, and also part of the larger one. However – it is easy to take that too far, and conclude that it is part and parcel of this Administration’s goals and governing philosophy, which is forever and always, made up of only two elements:
1) accruing political power, in order to,
2) accrue monetary wealth, for Their People, which is in essence a very narrowly defined subset of corporate executives.
That is it. It’s that simple. They’re not geniuses – they’re merely ruthless, and single-minded in their pursuit of these two fairly basic goals.
Science (or anything else) is uninteresting to this Administration, except to the extent that an element of it can be used as a political cudgel to further 1), or in any way in service of 2). Every position and action they’ve ever taken follows from this fairly simply formulation. Viewed through this lens, it’s fundamentally beside the point what they, or Bush, “believes” on anything, as their metric for action is not based in any way on belief or evidence, but in very narrow political and monetary self-interest.