The present administration is currently getting more and more into trouble for “sexing up” intelligence reports, either distorting them or making them up out of whole cloth, in order to further a political and ideological agenda. The intelligence community has taken a hard hit for these political incursions into what must, for the sake of national security, be a non-partisan endeavor. This naturally does not faze the Bush administration, which has shown no hesitancy to shred our national resources in order to get their goodies.

So it should come as no surprise that the Bush people have been even busier “sexing up” another vital source of information, that being the scientific research done by government agencies.

Want an abstinence-only sex education program due to your political and religious beliefs, even though it has proven a failure? No problem. All you have to do is stack a key panel with your own ideologues, censor information that disagrees with your beliefs, and re-write the rules for measuring success so that your program “achieves” it.

Your education policy is not as successful as others that you oppose? The answer is simple. Send out an order to censor any and all information presented to the public that “runs counter to administration priorities” (actual quote), including all information that does not support the president’s plans or is counter to his philosophy.

You don’t like drug treatment, despite the fact that it has been found to be “7 times more cost effective than domestic law enforcement method, 10 times more effective than interdiction, and 23 times more effective than the ‘source control’ method“? No sweat. Just require all members of the nation’s council on drug abuse to pass a litmus test. If they don’t support faith-based programs, if they support abortion rights (that’s not an error, they ask that for some reason), or if they have not voted for Bush–then give them their walking papers. The candidates you have left after this filtering process will miraculously find that science supports exactly what you want it to. Simple!

A recent report from a ranking member of the House Committee on Government Reform tears into the Bush administration for its malfeasance in subverting science to serve political ends–and this is just what has come out so far. Not that it should come as a surprise–we’ve known Bush has been cooking the books since he got into office–but this report details some of the abuse quite nicely.