In politics you can say things that are are only partly true, or not true at all, and normally there are no consequences. Politics rewards the joke, the quip, the “avenging crusader” riding in to save the taxpayer’s hard-won dollars. Style counts, big time.

Science is all about the facts of course.

The upshot is that it’s always easy for a politician to take shots at the detail-oriented nerds, especially when the funding is so often dependant upon the politicians.

I don’t wish to trivialize politicians or glorify scientists. They are both necessary and they both have their place. However we know that it’s easy to take cheap shots against science from the politicians.

I have a friend who just retired from her job as a cost analyst for the DoD. She was fairly high up, and so I sometimes asked her about news stories about DoD waste. She would explain the situation in detail, and in almost every case, the spending was perfectly reasonable and had been misrepresented by the news media. The few cases where she agreed that money had been wasted involved contracts that went out to provide services normally provided directly by the military. The military was so overstretched that they had to turn to outside contractors to handle some of the needs of the troops in Iraq. These contractors, realizing the time pressure that the DoD was under, engaged in price gouging and got away with it because the contracts were “rush jobs” that by law do not have to go through the normal bidding process. I’ve probably gotten a few details wrong in my description, but that’s the basic idea.