The GOP's Junk Science Crusade
Lysenko lives -- and works for George W. Bush!
by Tamara Baker

Sept. 20, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- I'm sure you all have heard about, and perhaps even seen, religious-right hireling John Stossel's TV shows dedicated to smacking around what he and his buyers at Palmer Chitester term "junk science" -- that is, any science that can't be used to justify the conservatives' corporate or religious status quo in America. Of course, as with nearly all conservative rants, this is a classic case of projection: the alleged science that Stossel and his backers are promoting is itself the real "junk science," based not on the scientific method, but on greed and wishful thinking.

We see this sort of projectionism whenever anyone in the Bush Junta opens his or her mouth.

They want to save Social Security by privatization -- which benefits no one but
their brokerage-firm buddies.

They want to jump-start the economy by giving their rich donor friends trillions in tax monies -- even though this money is far less likely to actually circulate through the economy than if it was given to Joe and Jane Average.

They want to restore honor and dignity to America by giving it an unelected pair of leaders with at least five DUIs and one desertion between them.

They want to hunt down a Saudi terrorist mastermind by invading Iraq, a country which is not at all friendly to Osama Bin Laden.

They're looking after the environment by pretending we don't need to do anything to combat global warming.

They were also looking after the environment when they fired the scientist who released a map of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the public, showing exactly where the Bushies want to drill.

And now, in the finest Bush/GOP tradition of "don't confuse me with the facts," we have their decision, in the name of preserving medicine, to destroy it:

The Bush administration has begun a broad restructuring of the
scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy in
areas such as patients' rights and public health, eliminating
some committees that were coming to conclusions at odds with the
president's views and in other cases replacing members with
handpicked choices.

In the past few weeks, the Department of Health and Human
Services has retired two expert committees before their work was
complete. One had recommended that the Food and Drug
Administration expand its regulation of the increasingly
lucrative genetic testing industry, which has so far been free
of such oversight. The other committee, which was rethinking
federal protections for human research subjects, had drawn the
ire of administration supporters on the religious right,
according to government sources.

Oh, brother.

But wait: It gets worse:

A third committee, which had been assessing the effects of
environmental chemicals on human health, has been told that
nearly all of its members will be replaced -- in several
instances by people with links to the industries that make those
chemicals. One new member is a California scientist who helped
defend Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against the real-life Erin
Brockovich.

Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse!

Dear readers, go and Google the name "Trofim Lysenko".

You'll find out that, for decades during Stalin's reign of terror, this barely-literate hack controlled virtually all aspects of Soviet science, especially in the fields of medicine and genetics. His word was law; anything that didn't back up his word was banished from sight. He helped severely cripple Soviet advancement.

Now, it seems that under George W. Bush, Lysenko, who was thought to have died forty years ago, is alive and well and working for the Republican Party.