Some thoughts on the real “war on science”:
This, of course, is a charge that Democrats usually love to levy against Republicans. When Barack Obama took office in 2008, Democrats swooned that we finally had a “pragmatist” back in the White House after eight years of a Republican president who supposedly favored ideology to facts on everything from science to foreign policy. Translation: Democrats act based on knowing things because they are smarter and think about them rationally and scientifically, while Republicans act based on believing things because they are religious, ill-informed, or misled by powerful interest groups.
The last few years have supplied ample evidence of the opposite — namely, that Democrats are the ideologues wearing blinders to shield themselves from inconvenient realities. Indeed, it is worth reviewing a list of items on which Democrats seem incapable of overcoming preconceptions and interest groups.
The long standing deceit and conceit of the left, as Jonah Goldberg has documented in his books, going all the way back to John Dewey, is that they are “pragmatic” and that everyone else is “ideological,” when of course it’s exactly the opposite. The great irony of last year’s election was that the nation actually had a choice between an leftist ideologue and a pragmatist: Romney truly doesn’t seem to have any political principles, and just wants to do what “works.” They chose the ideologue.
I know economics isn’t exactly a science, the way physics and chemistry are. (Although the consequences of bad economic policies are as inevitable as, say, jumping off the Empire State Building without a parachute to disprove the Law of Gravity.) But given the obvious fact that “liberals” (and by “liberals” I mean of course “tax-happy, coercion-addicted State-humpers”) have such problems with basic economics–as a look at the comments from dn-guy, Baghdad Jim, et al, will attest–why would I trust the Hive on the hard sciences?