[Vision2020] Don't Insult Our Intelligence (Leonard Pitts Jr.)

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (March 24, 2007) Spokesman Review -

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Don't insult our intelligence
Leonard Pitts Jr. 
Miami Herald
March 24, 2007

Hard to believe, but they're at it again.

After 2002, when a National Cancer Institute statement reporting no link
between abortion and breast cancer was changed by the Bush administration to
say evidence of a link was inconclusive; after the administration cut
language on global warming from a 2003 report by the Environmental
Protection Agency; after a government scientist was forbidden in 2001 and
2002 from discussing health hazards posed by airborne bacteria emanating
from animal waste at large factory farms; after 60 scientists, 20 of them
Nobel laureates, signed a statement in 2004 accusing the White House of
manipulating and distorting science for political aims; after all that, Team
Bush has once again been caught censoring science it dislikes.
 
I refer you to this week's testimony before the House Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform. The committee produced documents documenting many
dozens of instances in which the former chief of staff of the White House
Council on Environmental Quality edited scientific reports on global
warming. He cut definitive statements and replaced them with doubtful ones
in order to portray climate change as something less than the settled
science most experts consider it to be.

And get this: The guy changing the scientific reports is not a scientist.
Philip Cooney is an oil man, previously employed by the American Petroleum
Institute, the industry's lobbying arm. When he left the government in 2005,
he went to work for Exxon Mobil.

Can you say conflict of interest, boys and girls?

Democrats on the committee certainly could. Rep. Peter Welch from Vermont
compared Cooney to the tobacco industry "scientists" who once assured the
public cigarettes were perfectly safe.

Republicans struck back, noting that James Hansen, a NASA climatologist who
accuses the government of watering down the reports, is the recipient of a
$250,000 award for environmental achievement from a foundation run by Teresa
Heinz Kerry, wife of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry. Hansen, they
said, is hardly without political motive.

The charge might stick except for all those prior instances of the
administration changing science to fit politics. However one interprets
Hansen's motives, that pattern is still clear.

As the sins of Team Bush go, this isn't the biggest. That dishonor goes
either to bungling the war, mismanaging the peace or leaving New Orleans to
drown. Yet this is, in some ways, the sin that tells you the most about the
gang running this country and what they think of you and me.

Reasonable people, faced with facts leading to an unwanted conclusion, might
seek to discredit said facts or find competing facts supporting a more
palatable conclusion. But the Bush Gang simply ignores the facts, declaring
reality to be whatever they say it is. And if that bespeaks a breathtaking
gall, how much more gall, how much more utter "contempt" for people's
intelligence, is required to keep doing it after you've repeatedly been
called on it?

I could give you many reasons this makes me angry. I could speak about the
people's right not to be propagandized by their own government. I would
point out that this facts-optional approach shreds the government's
credibility.

But here's what really burns my toast: These people think I'm stupid. And
they think you're stupid, too. What else can we conclude of a government
that treats us with such brazen disdain?

They think we're a bunch of doofuses, dimwits and dolts who will never
notice that they've placed the interests of their cronies above our own.

For the record, I am not stupid, and I resent being treated as if I am.

How about you?

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"Forty percent of the mass of every tree in the forest is crude oil.  Stop
and think about that.  We call them fossil fuels because they used to be
live stuff . . . now in the ground is turned into crude oil." 

- Bill Sali (September 21, 2006)