Reply #8: Rethugs do this all-the-time, which is why fewer young Americans are

[Vitruvius]

going into science -- or any technical field.

If you go into government-funded basic research, one way to be sure your career will end early is to go into anything having to do with alternative energy, pollution, global warming, or the environment. The Dems fund those fields, scientists go in and make breakthrus, the Rethugs get in, chop the funding, and you're unemployed. And industry will NOT want to hire you -- industry is run by Rethugs who hate those fields of research, and they will blackball you.

I saw three generations of alternative energy and environmental scientists ruined this way -- under Nixon, under Reagan-Bu$hI, and now under Bu$h II. Rethugs are big on taking "revenge" on people they don't like...

And if you go straight into industry, the Rethugnican management will mark you as unpromotable and treat you like dirt -- especially if you make breakthrus for which they want the credit. In any Fortune 500 company, one of the best ways to get fired & blacklisted is to make a breakthru that is big enough to be featured in the annual report; the Rethugnican manageers (who said it couldn't be done) will smear you, fire you, blacklist you, and give the credit to themselves and their cronies.

Hence the saying: "First it's wrong, then it's obvious, then it's theirs. And you're out on your ass." (Of course, these same managers then proceed to lose your breakthrus to the Japanese; Rethugs are incompetent above all else...)

The same goes in politics; incompetents are dangerous people; they live by the smear; which is why incompetent Rethug phonies smear any public servant who has ever done anything constructive; it was inevitable that Bu$h the Rethug coward would smear the hell out of Kerry the war hero. Why should any lazy & arrogant Rethug do anything constructive (let alone risk getting shot at) when it's so easy to smear the competent, decent, honorable, and constructive?