{"id":6562,"date":"2006-02-08T10:33:18","date_gmt":"2006-02-08T15:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6562"},"modified":"2006-02-08T10:33:18","modified_gmt":"2006-02-08T15:33:18","slug":"what-it-takes-to-be-shown-the-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/what-it-takes-to-be-shown-the-door\/","title":{"rendered":"What it takes to be shown the door"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Deutsch is a quintessential example of what’s wrong with the Bush administration’s cronyism. Deutsch, who is 24 years old, was an intern with the Bush presidential campaign in 2004. He was quickly promoted to an influential role in NASA’s public affairs office, where he put his campaign skills to good use, badgering the agency’s technical staff<\/a> to refer to the Big Bang as a “theory.”<\/p>\n

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.<\/p>\n

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”<\/p>\n

It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yesterday, Deutsch resigned from NASA. Was he forced out because administration officials realized he was an unqualified hack, meddling in science he knows nothing about? No, that’s not really a disqualifying factor with these guys. Deutsch is gone because he lied about getting a college degree<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his resume on file at the agency asserted.<\/p>\n

Mr. Deutsch’s educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.<\/p>\n

After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an interview: “It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m glad Deutsch is gone, but just once I’d like to see someone get sacked for being incompetent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Deutsch is a quintessential example of what’s wrong with the Bush administration’s cronyism. Deutsch, who is 24 years old, was an intern with the Bush presidential campaign in 2004. He was quickly promoted to an influential role in NASA’s public affairs office, where he put his campaign skills to good use, badgering the agency’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}