Talk politics.

One topic that keeps recurring in the United States is the idea that the government should teach in public schools a narrowly defined religious--political viewpoint that blends together the worst traits of Ayn Rand's Objectivism with the ideas of 19th Century and later Protestant Fundamentalism. In a characteristically US fashion it blends a skullduggery-ridden practice and ideological end with an obnoxious favoring of malarkey over reality.

One interesting aspect of this has been that particularly under the last administration there has been a much-publicized and well-decried attempt to censor climatology to suit political agendas:

http://go.ucsusa.org/RSI_list/index.php

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml

Too, due to the similarly religious-mammonistic correlation so often seen in US politics, the Bush Administration decided that some biological experiments just ain't worth it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/jul/20/genetics.usnews

And everyone saw this, and declared it deplorable and a sign that under George W. Bush the USA was sliding slowly and inexorably to the day when the legions in khaki pants and white shirts would be marching and shouting "Freedom!" at the top of their lungs to the Dear Leader from Connecticut the lying carpetbagger-er Texas.

Yet science and honest reporting of scientific realities of key importance have been toyed with under the new guy, too:

( links under a cut for the link-phobic )

Yet outside of a narrow domestic set of news-gatherers and quite a few foreign ones, the outrage over the Obama Administration's politicization of both science and the degree to which the BP Spill still directly affects people in the United States has been quite muted, even on FOX, where Wisconsin union strikers are secretly agents of El-Baradei, avatar of Nyarlathotep. This has interested me on several levels, just as the selective amnesia about three bombing raids over the No-Fly Zones in the 1990s does. However this one is much more personal, and where the worst cases of climate change and its effects put them off for a century or so, this is affecting people in the USA right the Hell now.

So my question is a simple, sincere one: Why is it that George Bush vetoing stem cell research and monkeying with climatology was a threat to all we hold dear but the Obama Administration's very BP-friendly policies here on the Gulf are not? In my view, the answer as always is that "evil is only something the other guys do" but I'm curious as to how other people see this.