It's popular to lament the politicization of important ideas like health care but it didn't start during the term of President Obama; let's keep in mind that war protests conveniently stopped after November of 2008, for no other reason than that the people behind the protests got their candidate elected - troops are still everywhere, the president launched two more military strikes against 'sovereign nations no threat to anyone outside their own borders' last week. And President Lyndon Johnson handily beat Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, thanks in part to producing a video showing a little girl being vaporized by a nuclear bomb.
Science academia and media isn't immune to red language and blue language hyperbole. While every decision by President Bush was hyper-analyzed and declared as evidence that the entire Republican party was anti-science, once the evidence became clear that President Obama does the exact same things, and that the left-wing isn't more rational, they are just anti-science about different stuff (food science, energy science and vaccines rather than evolution, global warming and hESCs), criticism of the administration got stuffed into the same dark corner Cindy Sheehan did.
The President has declared that 463 White House employees are 'essential', but only security guards, a few information systems people, and someone to check in on Antarctica once in a while are essential at the National Science Foundation. So much for restoring science to its rightful place.
In reality, science is no different than any other political constituency - and when 50% of all science funding is controlled by the government, it is a political constituency - at any time during history.
Alex Berezow, editor of Real Clear Science, writes a post noting, among other things, that the kinds of spin that would have been tripped up during the Bush days are dismissed as minority beliefs by the same science media that declared science must be a Democratic PAC. The right-wing is still doing their schtick too, but the days when anyone could pretend it was one-sided anti-science crackpottery are long gone.
A Skeleton in America's Closet By Alex B. Berezow, Real Clear Science
