Remember last week when Myers, over at Pharyngula, posted about the news that a Bush admin flunky was telling NASA not to refer to the Big Bang, unless they stickered it with “only a theory, ID possible”? His post included this bit:
Deutsch is 24 years old, having just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism a few years ago. As a reward for being a loyal Republican party apparatchik, he has been generously appointed to be a Political Officer enforcing doctrine over a bunch of high-falutin’ rocket scientists. Shades of Lysenko!
It must have been a heady feeling to have the power to dictate ideology to a lot of scientists with Ph.D.s.
Well, in a blast of Earl karma, I read this today on Bruce Sterling’s blog:
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his resume on file at the agency asserted.
The quotes in Sterling’s piece get even better later on.
Good thing for the Bush administration that this is the first time they’ve appointed someone untterly incompetent. If this sort of thing had happened before, people might be starting to see a pattern.
EDIT TO ADD: Ha ha, it gets better.
