The College Fix

According to a story featured on the homepage of the Washington Post today, liberals are now celebrating tax-payer funded “odd ball science,” such as the  $384,949 scientist Patricia Brennan received from the U.S. government to study duck genitalia.

Brennan has now become a liberal hero, according to the Post:

Brennan is trying to do something new with an old and uncomfortable role in Washington politics. Having been spotlighted as a nutty professor — frittering away taxpayer money on oddball research — she has sought to own that role proudly, and defend oddball science itself, as a key part of what America does.

Is it working? She’s been re-tweeted 1,000 times, praised on MSNBC and thanked by professors and science lovers around the country.

But, in past controversies like this one, Washington has never been very interested in the nutty professor’s side of the story.

“This mockery of science has to stop. It just has to stop. These are people who just don’t understand science at all,” Brennan said Monday during a phone interview.

Did you get that? Opposing government waste in this era of severe national budget deficits is now tantamount to mocking science itself! I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

It’s an article of faith among American liberals that conservatives are ignorant and anti-science. It’s one of the ways of thinking the left uses in order to cultivate a sense of superiority.

But I’d say what’s ignorant about all this, if anything, is they way advocates of limitless government spending ignore the $1.4 trillion federal budget deficit we are currently running in this country–as if it has no consequences at all.

We all know there are massive amounts of waste in almost any area of the federal budget.

You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that we can’t go on forever running up debts and spending more than we have. There won’t be much money left for duck genital research or any other kind of research if our economy goes belly up, Greece-style, under the weight of compounding debts and a sagging economy.

The numbers don’t lie. In that sense, if anyone’s being “anti-science” it’s those who heedlessly ignore our current budget crisis, thinking that those massive debt obligations will somehow disappear by themselves.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

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