Little Little Man

In the case of Garrison Keillor I don't believe I can act as any more than a vessel. I can't even claim to be a diehard fan, having probably heard no more than a couple dozen hours total of PHC personally. Nevertheless, the man is something of an oracle or touchstone for me.

He offers up some of that refreshing plain rye-speaking from the middle here under the title The Little Man: History will remember Bush as an incompetent and incurious man overwhelmed by a world too big for him:

The headline of the AP story was "Bush Urges Confidence in His Leadership" -- which is like "Author Says Memoir Is True" or "FEMA Offers Contingency Plan" -- and I didn't bother to read further. The Old Brush Cutter never got the knack of urging, and whenever he tries, he looks small and petulant, like a cartoon of himself. He photographs well in formal situations, and he is good at keeping a low profile when necessary, which is a key to survival in politics, as in boxing, but when it comes to the hortatory, he gets all hissy and squinty.
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Republicans believe in smaller government and deregulation, but it takes more and more of their friends and loved ones to not regulate us, and who can blame them? Washington is the perfect place for the slacker child who flubbed his way through college and flopped in business and whom friends and family kept having to prop up -- find him a government job. Government service is a broadening experience. It certainly has been for Mr. Bush. He has traveled to China and Europe and other places that never interested him before. He has come into contact with the poor people of New Orleans in a way that never would have occurred to him in his earlier years. He has met opera singers and jazz musicians and journalists. This is all good.

And he has met the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and visited with young people horribly wounded in the war, which would be a soul-searing experience for any commander. To see a beautiful young woman who must now live without an arm as a direct result of decisions you made -- who could see this and not scour the depths of your conscience?

And to suffer pangs of conscience even as you exhort the public to have confidence in you -- this has to be an interesting experience. Your mistakes are responsible for terrible suffering, but you stand among your victims and urge public support for your policies as a sign of support for the people those policies have injured. This is a plot worthy of Shakespeare.

So why does he still seem so small, our president? In his presidential library, he'll be portrayed as Abraham Lincoln after Chancellorsville and FDR after Corregidor, but to most of us, the crisis in Washington today stems from a man intellectually and temperamentally unequipped to rise to the challenge. Most of us sense that when, decades from now, the story of this administration comes out, it will be one of ordinary incompetence, of rigid and incurious people overwhelmed by events in a world they don't dare look around and see.

Maybe Karma Still Happens, Too?

As you're no doubt aware, one of the primary recent public battlefronts in the Bush vs. Science war has occurred at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, familiarly NASA. Senior scientist James Hansen went public recently with complaints of attempts to censure him after he spoke out (not for the first time) on the increasing threats of global warming, a subject that is of course anathema to the famously "we'll create our own reality" empire-builders in the incurious unaccountable george 2 chickenhawks memorial administration. He was directed to have his upcoming speeches, papers, and press contacts vetted by public affairs staff at a level that seemed far beyond the norm. The latter are apparently largely political appointees, a troubling note.

One specific egregious and galling subsequent episode at NASA was a reported case in which a report that included references to the well-established concept of the "Big Bang" was pointedly updated to include the words "theory of" before every instance of "BB." The obvious intent was to diminish the credibility of that widely-held, yes, Theory, presumably leaving the door open for alternative theories based on, say necromancy, an episode involving an ouija board and prescott bush or some other ethically-crippled ancestor of the president, or some yet-to-be-detailed program that could help to reconcile a theory of life on earth having first miraculously appeared 6,000 years or so ago.

Shortly after that the primary NASA administrator made a public statement that NASA was committed to doing and reporting science openly, by implication not submitting to a lot of arbitrary anti-scientific censorship or testing for "correctness" against outside issues such as non-science ideology. Especially since I suspect the administrator is also a political appointee, that was impressive.

Now there's this news regarding what I believe is the public affairs officer who was so obsessive about trying to move the Big Bang Theory back out there with Peter Pan or something. Apparently he's another bush "heckuva job" appointee with credentials that not only don't fit the job but in this case don't exist. From Talking Points Memo [added emphasis is mine]:

George C. Deutsch, the young Bush campaign flack who was telling NASA personnel that they shouldn't discuss the Big Bang without considering the topic from its religious perspective, has been forced to resign. As reported first earlier today by the Scientific Activist blog, Deutsch claimed on his resume on file at NASA that he was a graduate of Texas A&M.

Only he never graduated.

So he lied on his resume, and presumably his job application too. Always a bad move if you're planning to become embroiled in a major media firestorm.

Just to keep the recollection fresh, Deutsch was an intern in the Bush-Cheney 2004 'war room'. That qualified him for his next assignment screening scientific information NASA personnel could communicate to the public.

When reviewing NASA documents Deutsch became concerned at references to the 'Big Bang'.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," he instructed one person working at NASA. "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator ... This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

Deutsch's directive was that every reference to the 'big bang' be preceded by the words 'theory of'. And a number of you wrote in to say that whatever Deutsch's foolery, it is correct to refer to the Big Bang as a 'theory'. Indeed, the big bang is much closer to being a 'theory' in the colloquial sense of the word (as opposed to the scientific sense) than evolution is.

That is quite true. But Deutsch's comments above show that a narrow scientific reading, absent the political context, misses the point.

Deutsch told the NASA guy that the Big Bang was not a "proven fact", which is certainly true. But in no meaningful sense is it mere "opinion."

It's not just some idea someone thought up which stands on an equal footing with any other idea anyone else could cook up. Among cosmologists today, it's the dominant theory about how the universe began. It is based on various theoretical work (which I won't try to understand or explain) and supported by a lot of astrophysical data.

The theory could turn out to be wrong. And it will almost certainly end up being revised in one or more ways. But it is not 'opinion'.

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