Last week former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson used his column in the Washington Post to rubbish the idea that the Bush administration has been hostile to science.
“There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a ‘war on science’,” he wrote.
He goes on to accuse liberals of playing politics:
Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled “anti-science.” Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as “theological” and thus illegitimate.
Liberal views are “objective” while traditional moral convictions are “biased.” Public scrutiny of scientific practices is “politicizing” important decisions.
Cue an online bunfight…
One of the first into the fray was Chris Mooney, who happens to have written a book entitled The Republican War on Science. He concluded his brief blog post on the subject thus: “In short, Gerson’s oped is a joke. No need for debunking, just laughing.”
Then on Sunday in the Dallas Morning News he set out the evidence for a ‘war on science’ again, concluding: “science is under political attack … The only question is how long researchers are going to sit and take it.”
Over at Washington Monthly Kevin Dunn argued of Gerson’s piece: “The disingenuousness here is breathtaking. Yes, liberals and conservatives have different views about sex education and stem cells, but those aren’t even close to being the core issues in the liberal critique of the Republican war on science.”
Meanwhile, the Campaign for America’s Future blog has a breakdown of the arguments, accusing Gerson of setting up strawmen and highlighting his allusions to Nazi Germany.
Not everyone is anti-Gerson. The Heritage Foundation declares:
There is a war on science all right. And it is being waged by liberals so that they can scare the public into granting them the extensive government control of the entire economy that they have always wanted.