The Medieval Presidency

Neal Gabler has an excellent piece about how George Bush may be running the nation’s first medieval presidency—one where rationality and empiricism have gone out the window to be replaced by faith and a preconceived cosmology. There’s lots of discussion of this over at Kos, and I think he’s on to something here. In a similar vein, CalPundit cites a piece for the Boston Globe by Chris Mooney about the 1995 demise of the congressional Office of Technology in the Newt Gingrich-led Congress, and how such an institution is unlikely to be revived in the today’s Republican-led Congress, this reflecting the waning influence of scientists on national policy.