EXCUSE OUR IGNORANCE – AT 9:42 A.M. ET:  Please remember that we on our side must apologize each day for our ignorance, our anti-science attitudes and our general lack of appreciation for the intellectual establishment that has done so much to enhance our universities and our media. 

Not.

Being "anti-science" has now become the trendy charge launched at conservatives, or, indeed, at anyone who dares to question the accepted scientific truths of the political left.  Rich Lowry is having none of it.  Frankly it's about time our side started snapping back at the trendies who believe they have the intellectual high ground, which they've actually never even visited.  From NRO:

The last time Republicans were roundly condemned as anti-science, it was for their resistance to destroying human embryos for stem cells. Their crude religiosity supposedly blocked imminent leaps ahead in medical progress.

Then-vice-presidential candidate John Edwards went so far as to predict in 2004 that because of “the work we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair, and walk again.”

In other words, as a major figure in the self-styled party of science, Edwards made an outlandish assurance worthy of a faith healer. For the Left, science is as much a branding device and political bludgeon as a serious commitment. Edwards didn’t know the first thing about spinal-injury research and didn’t care — so long as he could sell demagogic flimflammery under the banner of glorious science.

Recall please that it took the National Enquirer to bring down John Edwards, a lowlife who'd made his fortune as an ambulance-chasing lawyer, using the worst of junk science in the courtroom.  But Edwards is a liberal, and so was never questioned on his shady past or bizarre present.

Lowry notes that Texas Governor Rick Perry "is portrayed as the worst threat to science since the Inquisition had a few words with Galileo, or as they say in Texas, 'treated him pretty ugly.'"

In no sense that the ordinary person would understand the term is Rick Perry “anti-science.” He hasn’t criticized the scientific method, or sent the Texas Rangers to chase out from the state anyone in a white lab coat. In fact, the opposite. His website touts his Emerging Technology Fund as an effort to bring “the best scientists and researchers to Texas.” The state has a booming health-care sector composed of people who presumably have a healthy appreciation for the dictates of science.

And...

An Al Gore makes it sound as if there is no scientific alternative to his policy preferences. They are believers wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of science while lacking all the care and dispassionate reasoning we associate with the practice of it.

COMMENT:  I've always believed that the climate-change skeptics are intensely pro science.  They're asking for real scientific proof, not theories and projections dressed up as "science."  They want to know whether the vast investments demanded by the climate-change lobby will actually produce any legitimate results.  For asking these questions they're branded as flat Earthers and even the equivalent of Holocaust deniers or racists.

This has happened before.  In the Dark Ages those who asked too many questions were burned at the stake.  Today the in-crowd ruins their reputations.  And people are indeed afraid.  Fortunately, the brave continue to speak out, on behalf of real science.

August 30, 2011