I wish I could have been shocked by this

It's nice and early in the morning. Was up reading about the split-second loss the Illini had yesterday and getting ready for Super Bowl Extra Large when I decided to browse the political blogs (after all, you never know if we might have invaded someone overnight). That was where I learned this (from the New York Times, registration required)

In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.

...Mr. Deutsch [is] a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

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."

Thank you, Mr. Deutsch, for once again affirming why people need to take science classes, and perhaps learn something from them. Should we go over the scientific method again? The definition of theory? How scientists take observations and produce testable hypotheses and how the more tests a hypothesis passes, the more validity it gains?

Of course not. He clearly wouldn't understand what's really going on if I explained it to him - he doesn't want to. That would mean opening his pinheaded little skull and putting something new and perhaps contradictory to what he believes inside, let it all rattle around, and see what gets produced. That, of course, would be a sign of intelligence, and the practice of good scientists.

I wonder how many years it would take to undo the damage that the Bush Administration has done to our world. I fear we will never find out.

Big hat tip to Bad Astronomy for this story.