Power "Science"

You know how this whole websurfing thing goes. One can wind up in the most unlikely of places at times.

And so it was that I was poking around the rightie blogs looking for some comment or recognition of the Zogby poll of US troops in Iraq. I rather expected some attack on Zogby himself as a partisan hack whose polling ability is woefully biased. More expectedly, however, I couldn't find a mention of it, at all.

Which is how I got to Powerline. But in cruising around there I happened to stumble upon a post about science, which, as you may well imagine, contained one of the most laughable conspiracy theories yet regarding what the braintrust at Powerline believes is the cabal of leftist scientists devoted to destroying the American way of life:

In recent years, the politicization of science by the left has become a serious problem....

leading scientific journals have been taken over by liberals who value politics over truth. So any time you see a news report on a "scientific" journal article that ostensibly has political implications, you should greet it with skepticism.

Assrocket has just claimed that "science" journals (ahh, the scare quotes) are nothing more than vehicles for leftist politics, a conspiracy so vast it induces an sense of vertigo. If you are inclined to believe such nonsense, that is.

After seeing this, I wrote to Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, to give him a heads up about this one. I knew the good folks at Scienceblogs would have a grand time with it. And, indeed, they did. In fact, they were already on it.