Sidney Blumenthal, Bushologist and former Clinton advisor, has written an illuminating article that suggests a connection between the devastation of New Orleans and a known practice of the Bush administration: the trumping of science by ideology, or (as characterized last year by a scientific group including 20 Nobelists) "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

Acting for "partisan political ends" would include kowtowing to the Christo-Republicans. But overall the scientists were too kind in their characterization. Many decisions of the Bushniks are motivated by simple greed, abetted by meanness and stupidity.

Here's a timeline of hurricane-related decisions that I've extracted from Blumenthal's findings—

• 2001. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war.
   
• 2002. "My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report.
   
• 2003. When the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions.
   
• 2003. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands.... But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.
   
• 2004. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken.
   
• 2004. The Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent.
   
• 2005. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze.
   
• 2005. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.
   

Blumenthal's point overall is what I call the "neo-medieval" mindset of this administration. He gives a number of fine examples from the past two weeks—

• The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board.1
   
• The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda — the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence."
   
• When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job.
   
• When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings.
   
• At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

If the Cheney administration can accomplish all that in just two weeks, imagine what they can do between now and January 2009.

Follow-up post
FEMA. It's time to point the finger (9/2/05)