The Bush Doctrine

Some have referred to the President's wrong headed policy of pre-emptive war as the "Bush Doctrine". I'm going to the suggest the term would better be applied to a more pervasive aspect of the current regime.

BushCorp™ hostility towards scientific fact is, at this point, common knowledge. Any fact that doesn't support, or God forbid, actually contradicts BushCorp™'s faith/greed/fear based policies is deleted, altered or ignored, and its proponents fired, silenced or smeared. This is, I believe, the real "Bush Doctrine". And it's used to apply to an amazing array of topics.

Medicare bill too expensive? Change the numbers and threaten the bean-counter with the true count of the beans.

Alaskan Refuge drilling too damaging to the environment? Re-define the "footprint" so it ignores little things like roads and access routes.

No WMD? Well, outed CIA spy Valerie Plame wears the pants in Ambassador Joe Wilson's family. You gonna believe someone who's so obviously 'whipped?

And then there's global warming.

It's increasingly apparent that BushCorp™ and fellow travelers are the only people on the globe for whom the "jury's still out" on the effect of man-made pollutants on the world's climate. Now House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) is now seeking to intimidate and harass scientists who had the nerve to demonstrate that the administration's head in the sand approach to global warming is wrong, and even some Republicans are nervous:

Mr. Barton's Republican colleagues say they were stunned by the manner in which the committee, whose chairman rejects the existence of climate change, demanded personal and private information last month from researchers whose work supports a contrary conclusion. The scientists, co-authors of an influential 1999 study showing a dramatic increase in global warming over the past millennium, were told to hand over not only raw data but personal financial information, information on grants received and distributed, and computer codes.

I suppose this is the next logical step for the Bush Doctrine: rather than just deny and obfuscate scientific data after the fact, how much better to intimidate scientists into not doing the research in the first place?