The Decider Versus the Provider

Yesterday, Barack Obama put right a government policy Dubya set religiously wrong:  Obama guaranteed a “return to scientific integrity” and instantly became “The Provider” of doing the right thing for the future good of us all. 

Mr. Obama delighted many scientists and patients by formally announcing that he was overturning the Bush administration’s limits on embryonic stem cell research. But the president also went one step further, issuing a memorandum that sets forth broad parameters for how his administration would choose expert advisers and use scientific data.

The document orders Mr. Obama’s top science adviser to help draft guidelines that will apply to every federal agency. Agencies will be expected to pick science advisers based on expertise, not political ideology, the memorandum said, and will offer whistle-blower protections to employees who expose the misuse or suppression of scientific information.

The idea, the president said in remarks before an audience of lawmakers, scientists, patients advocates and patients in the East Room, is to ensure that “we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology”: a line that drew more applause than any other. Irv Weissman, who directs an institute at Stanford University devoted to studying stem cells, called the declaration “of even greater importance” than the stem cell announcement itself.

Obama’s move to bring back the cool logic of science back into mainstream American thinking is absolutely the right course we need to set into a brighter future.

Obama proves intellectualism must rule over religious fervor.  Communal science must always triumph over individual belief.  Challenging what we think we know is always more dangerous than blindly accepting the predestined decisions of antiquity.

Then, of course, Obama has his enemies that argue emotion and not fact and who always bring up Hitler and other dictators to scare the American public into thinking their way instead of logically persuading us that they’re right in the end result:

BECK: So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

We must not return to the closed-minded, darkness-seeking past of the last eight years.

We must instead lift our heads together to the sky to see beyond the horizon before us and to lean into our futures and to find our better health and to navigate our more logical being — and we only achieve those ends through faith in the facts of the scientific process and an undeniable want for mechanical knowing.