Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Who are you going to believe? Me or recorded history?

For those haven’t been following the fun, Sean Davis at The Federalist has been using science-y bloviator Neil DeGrasse Tyson as a chew toy. See:

In each of those Davis unmasks Tyson’s lack of integrity. While not rising to the level of Ward Churchill or Michael Mann levels of dishonesty because the examples Tyson gives serve to show the superiority of science-y stuff, and of Tyson’s intellect, over judges, politicians, etc. Naturally, Tyson’s acolytes haven’t been amused. When the faked quote controversy was appended to the worshipful Tyson Wikipedia biography, the “objective” editors at Wikipedia refused to allow mention. In retaliation, Wikipedia attempted to remove the entry on The Federalist.

Suffice it to say a) Tyson is a blowhard who is completely in love with himself and b) he is the leader of a cult of vicious gits who failed high school chemistry but now imagine themselves to be science-y because they sniff Tyson’s methane eruptions thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

All of these various manufactured quotes are benign, in and of themselves. But Tyson, being a leftist had to take a personal swipe at President Bush. Via Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist:

And perhaps most oddly, given how easy it is to check out, Tyson frequently shared a quotethat he attributed to President George W. Bush despite no record of this quote existing elsewhere.

According to Tyson, in the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Bush uttered the phrase, “Our God is the God who named the stars.” According to Tyson, the president made that claim as a way of segregating radical Islam from religions like Christianity or Judaism. You can watch it here.

This quote is total crap. Not only did it never happen, but it flies in the face of every single statement made by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.

Now Tyson has finally responded:

I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the President. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere — surely every word publicly uttered by a President gets logged.

Actually it isn’t odd at all. If every word the president says in public gets recorded (and it does) and you remember him saying something else then Occam’s Razor, a science-y concept, says you are ****ed up.

But wait, there’s more.

Back to Mollie Hemingway. Tyson elaborates:

FYI: There are two kinds of failures of memory. One is remembering that which has never happened and the other is forgetting that which did. In my case, from life experience, I’m vastly more likely to forget an incident than to remember an incident that never happened. So I assure you, the quote is there somewhere. When you find it, tell me. Then I can offer it to others who have taken as much time as you to explore these things.

Ummm. There is a third kind of memory. It is the kind that pathological liars have that allows them to make up stuff and convince themselves it is true. And in the process convince the credulous nincompoops that follow them to also believe the lie. That is what we are witnessing here.

As we’ve noted before, on the secular left science is not a process of inquiry, it is an ersatz religion. It has its own creation myth (evolution, the Big Bang), its own story of the Fall of Man (industrialization, organized religion, global warming), and a tale of redemption and salvation (environmentalism, no perversion left behind, and reason). Tyson is not a scientist in the sense of someone who honors scientific method. He knows everything and, therefore, has nothing left to learn.

Were he a scientist he would not go about making up anecdotes, slandering people, and insisting that his own memory is infallible and that a press corps that pounced on every verbal misstep by President Bush missed something this glaring. Rather a scientist would at least entertain the possibility that they were in error.

Tyson is as rigid and unyielding in his disdain for anyone one who would disagree with him as any imam who ever crawled out of tribal Afghanistan. His followers would be a Taliban if they were smarter, better educated, and had more ambition.