Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Politics-Free?

James Bowman, writing in The New Criterion, on getting politics out of politics. An excerpt:

Nowadays, if you’re a bureaucrat who doesn’t like the decision some other bureaucrat has made, your first recourse is to moralize the difference between you. The other bureaucrat, you insist, is not just mistaken in his judgment of the public good, he is wicked and corrupt for ignoring the advice of "scientists" — whose scientific knowledge, as we have seen, comes with no more political skills than are vouchsafed to non-scientists — in making specifically political decisions. Politicians of the other political persuasion who know quite well that this is not the case will pretend to believe you all the same and thunder, along with The New York Times, against the unconscionable, immoral, indecent behavior of their political enemies.

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