Neil deGrasse Tyson Should Stick to the Rhetoric of Logos; Not Pathos and Ethos

Rich Lowry does an excellent summary of Neil deGrasse Tyson's "just-so" account of a President Bush myth in The Cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson:

...When Tyson puts up a slide with George W. Bush’s name on it, the audience laughs, prepared to have its prejudices confirmed, and Tyson obliges with his bogus quote.

Tyson says that right after Sept. 11, Bush asserted the superiority of “we” to “they” (i.e., Muslim fundamentalists) by saying, “Our God is the God who named the stars.”...

...As Sean Davis pointed out in his initial piece on the dubious quote, it really came from a poetic tribute to the astronauts who died in the Columbia disaster in 2003. After quoting from Isaiah, Bush said, “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.”...

Porkopolis has highlighted Tyson's excellent essay The Perimeter of Ignorance and urges him to take the very advice he advocates in it:

The Perimeter of Ignorance: A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge...

Boehner's Bone-Headed Move

Boehner to Rangle then:

Boehner to Rangel: Give Up the Gavel

“...as chairman of the powerful House committee, entrusted with the responsibility of writing the tax laws that affect every law-abiding American citizen, you, along with the Speaker and other leaders of the majority party, have an obligation to help set the pace when it comes to standards of official conduct.”

Boehner to Rangle now:

Censure briefly forgotten as House leaders honor Rep. Charles Rangel

House leaders honored Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y) with an official Capitol portrait Thursday, sweeping aside two years of scandal and a formal rebuke to recognize a man who rose from humble beginnings to become a congressional pioneer.

As a packed committee room full of hometown supporters and congressional allies serenaded Rangel with chants of “Charlie, Charlie,” it seemed as though the ethical firestorm that led to a House censure had been briefly forgotten.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) lauded his “long and highly decorated service,” joking that the two men were “in some ways cut from the same cloth” because they shared “a particular concern about our appearance.” Boehner, who pushed for Rangel to resign as the first African-American chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, described him as a friend and said that despite their differences, they spoke nearly every day on the House floor...