The old saying goes, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, it left me. Nowhere is this more acute than in science. Denial of reality is so endemic in today’s Teaparty GOP that simply recognizing the fact of evolution or the readings of super accurate thermometers managed by NASA climate scientists has become political suicide. Some in the GOP are reportedly, finally, trying to push back:

Former South Carolina GOP Rep. Bob Inglis, who lost his primary race last year in part because of his acknowledgment of the problem of climate change, is now giving speeches and lectures across the country about the need for conservatives to acknowledge the problem of climate change and work on solutions. He warns that the Republican Party will be branded “anti-science” if it doesn’t. He is bringing his message to conservative strongholds such as Federalist clubs and conferences of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The effort is duly noted, good luck, but the fact is the Republican Party has been branded antiscience for a long time and for a very good reason: they are anti-science.

The GOP is specifically anti-science, as when climate change threatens their energy industry masters, and in general anti-fact as the facts of recent history destroy the main planks in the Republican Party platform. This is an ideology that has failed catastrophically in every major way just in the last few years: GOP foreign policy brought us the Iraq War debacle; conservative economic policy brought us the Great Recession; conservative tax policy has come hand in hand with ever growing deficits.

The only option left, when reality deals out a hand that bad, to keep voters behind those same failed policies is to lie your fucking ass off and discredit factual sources of information. As long as he GOP is stuck having to bamboozle voters with emotional distractions and fabricated bullshit to win elections, any discipline which relies on facts and reasonable inference is going to fall by the wayside and that includes science.