Steve Silberman has an excellent piece on Why the GOP Hates the National Science Foundation.

The truth is, the current incarnation of the GOP, frozen in its pose of perpetually indignant outrage, doesn’t want additional perspective, more data and nuance, and — Heaven forbid — dissenting voices. The impulse to marginalize, condemn, ridicule, and finally choke off dissenting voices is not only what’s behind Senator Coburn’s war on the NSF, it’s behind the GOP-sponsored culture war that has sucked much of the oxygen out of the national discourse for more than a decade now.

Republicans don’t like science and scientists because they are sources of data that are independent of GOP-approved propaganda mills like Fox News. Pesky scientists and academics are always popping up to dispute the Roger Ailes-approved buzz-quote of the day — on climate change, on health care, on the effects of poverty on the rapidly evaporating middle class, on the diversity of American families, and on the importance of funding basic research instead of commercially-driven ventures constrained by short-term considerations like ROI.

Today’s GOP has a visceral distrust of scientists for the same reason that it has a visceral distrust of the “lamestream media” (particularly deeply reported news organizations like The New York Times), teachers, organized labor, regulatory agencies, National Public Radio, and protest movements that are have not been astroturfed for Fox News’ cameras by Koch Industries: They’re not with the program, whatever this week’s program might be — more windfalls to Big Oil, justifying torture, or floating amendments to officially brand gay people as second-class citizens.

Science, you could say, has a built-in left-wing bias, because it does not appeal to simplistic notions of God, country, tribal supremacy, or any of the other lesser angels of our nature that the GOP finds handy for its get-out-the-angry-vote drives. (The backers of a spectacularly mean-spirited effort to put a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage on the 2012 ballot in Minnesota — despite the fact that marriage equality is already illegal in that state — admitted that fundraising concerns were a motivating force in ramming the bigoted amendment through the House at the last minute, even against the wishes of Republicans in districts that are open-minded about marriage equality.)