The scientists charge that the White House is stacking scientific committees with political appointees, lobbyists and contrarians committed to ideologically conservative outcomes. That it is misrepresenting scientific findings, suppressing politically inconvenient research and rewriting expert reports to match its political interests.
A population that is only belatedly and reluctantly admitting to itself that it was misled into an unnecessary war based on false premises will not be keen to acknowledge that the same administration is similarly fiddling with science.
But ready or not, here's a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that documents the Bush administration's widespread practice of ignoring science that its politically conservative supporters or its corporate sponsors find inconvenient.
And an accompanying statement signed by 60 leading scientists, 20 of them Nobel laureates, charges that the administration is distorting science to suit its political ends.
We might do well to pause for a moment and wonder if there isn't a pattern here - in war, science and, for that matter, economics, too - of an administration that plays loose with the facts in order to justify pre-set ends.
The findings of the complaining scientists, after all, are of a piece with the emerged picture of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq as having been driven in about equal parts by exaggerating iffy or cautious intelligence and by pooh-poohing unwelcome alternatives to the attack.
The scientists charge that the White House is stacking scientific committees with political appointees, lobbyists and contrarians committed to ideologically conservative outcomes. That it is misrepresenting scientific findings, suppressing politically inconvenient research and rewriting expert reports to match its political interests.
The charges match the disturbing findings in a report prepared last year for Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, which catalogued the administration's subversion of science in environmental, medical and social issues.
To push for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, for instance, the Interior secretary misrepresented scientists' findings about caribou calving patterns. Research that would support regulation of industrial hog farms has been suppressed.
The National Cancer Institute was pressured to disavow research showing that abortions do not correlate with breast cancer. To placate religious conservatives, the president has restricted stem-cell research, undermining its promising medical potential.
And he has expanded abstinence-only programs, although studies find them ineffective, and is shutting down broad-based sex education, which the data show do reduce teen promiscuity and pregnancies.
Conservatives have had years of fun being theatrically outraged at liberal political correctness, which, when it is amiss, as it often is, ordinarily is more silly than pernicious. There are few real-world consequences.
But the Bush administration's political correctness in economic policy - the only thing better than one tax cut is another one, and another - has resulted in record indebtedness. In international affairs, the administration's ideology-driven agenda has produced a dubious policy war, and domestically its preference for attitude over results has led to environmental degradation and has stymied medical research.
