I was sitting in the bathtub reading a New Yorker article when I had a sudden insight into George Bush. The article was about how the Bush administration has completely messed up scientific inquiry and research due to their usual ideological rigidity. They ask scientists what they believe and reward "correct" answers about abstinence, stem cell research and Darwinism with research money and entre into the federal system of committees and scientific oversight. Of course Federal money and organization is critical to pure scientific research which is not going to be paid for by the large corporations that dominate our life, but the effort is meaningless if scientists are judged on their political opinions – science is not about opinions but data, and to be effective it has to be apolitical and not pounded into certain narrow holes.

But I understood as I soaked there why Bush is so ideological in every tiny detail of his government. Look at the psychology of it – you have a guy who wasn’t very good at school or very inquisitive. He’s always felt a little inferior to both those brains who seemed to know all the answers and to those hep cats who seemed so much cooler. The complexities and moral shadings of modern life are not always easy to figure out. His life was an unsuccessful mess until his religious conversion and then all of sudden he had it solved. The born again Christians had answers for everything – now he was just as good, no, better than anyone, he knew more than any scientist or intellectual, because he had a direct line to the absolute "truth," and damn (literally) anyone who didn’t agree – "reality based thinking" was passe.

And so the American people (sort of) elected him, evidently respecting his deep principles and piety, the intolerance, rigidity, blindness and sheer stupidity of his positions carelessly overlooked. Immediately the power grab began, as with corporate precision anyone who wasn’t in agreement with his fundamentalist creed was blacklisted from the government, regardless of their competence. What did it matter? Bush knew it all and his bud Rove was able to sell anything to an American public conditioned by years of advertising to eat crap and say it tastes good because everybody else says so.

But belief, though it changes our actions does not change reality. His great God given plan in Iraq turned absolutely disastrous, a fact obvious to a dispassionate observer from the start. His so called attributes of competence and forcefulness were exposed in the pathetic response to Katrina, and in fact EVERYTHING he’s done as President has been more or less a failure in reality because it wasn’t based on reality. Bush may be close to God but God hasn’t been playing along by making things happen the way Bush wanted. His smug certainty remains, unassailable, but it’s increasingly clear that, while his born again neo-con philosophy may have given him the answers he so prayed for, they’re the wrong answers. Once again dopey George has failed the test, only this time it’s our nation and the world who are playing the price.

"If you’re afraid to make decisions and you only worried about, you know, whether or not people in the classroom are going to say nice things about you, you’re not leading." said George today in his latest feeble attempt to defend his Iraq debacle, and it’s obvious that still carries the trauma of "people in the classroom" saying negative things about him (certainly his grammar still merits a failing grade). He’s leading all right — straight down a rat hole. Maybe he’ll notice soon that fewer and fewer people are following him.

And wasn’t there another time in history when science was persecuted by religious dogma, when the Western world made disastrous war on Islam for murky reasons, when the government consisted of one branch who tried to control every facet of the populace’s lives, when the leader claimed divine rights, when the little man was totally overpowered by large institutions? Oh yeah, we call it the Dark Ages…