Bush's apparatchik in NASA: obnoxious youth

A few weeks ago we read that some NASA 'public affairs' officer had been attempting to silence of NASA's senior climate researches. Apparently Dr. Hansen wasn't following the part line; he needed a handler present lest he talk too honestly to the press.

What we didn't hear, and what's buried at the back of recent NYT article, is a feature of that apparatchik that made him particularly annoying -- he's a kid, a presidential appointee with zero credentials. A classic Soviet era apparatchik...

NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness - New York Times

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

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.

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."

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.

... Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.

Bush's team appoints a flunkee to be their apparatchik for NASA. Said flunky starts drafting very annoying memos, implying dire consequences to those who disobeys. He's particularly concerned about affirming intelligent design and blocking talk of global climate change. An interesting story. So why did it get buried at the little read end of a NYT article?

The more I see Bush in action, the more convinced I am that he's a KGB implementation of 'The Manchurian Candidate'. It was a rogue mission by a Putin clique in the KGB, and it was thought to have failed. Their vehicle was far gone in alcohol and drug abuse. Miraculously he turns his life around and becomes president. Putin is astounded but he activates the original programming. Bush begins to transform the US into a satellite of the Soviet Union ...