Burn the Observatory!

Lots of blogs have picked up on this from the New York Times, but it is so appalling that it needs the broadest possible distribution. While President Bush runs around pretending to be a "techie," his appointees continue to stiffle science and scientists. At NASA, a 24 year old, former Bush-Cheney campaign worker, George Deutsch, requires that the word "theory" be added to the phrase "Big Bang" wherever it appears in a presentation of Einstein's work for middle school science classes.

"The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "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."

It continued: "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."

Mr. Deutsch could have suggested that adding the word "theory" to the "Big Bang" had an established journalistic precedent, The Associated Press Stylebook, but that was not his intent. No, Mr. Deutsch simply decides that to present the "Big Bang" as established science might somehow upset some fundamentalist Bush supporter somewhere.

Science be damned. Come on everybody, let's burn the observatory! Let's burn the universities, and books and all those liberal professors. Burn them all and then we can live in the dark.