Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, has made a few waves in the media and blogosphere, and rightly so. Check out this section from it, as quoted by Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s NYT:

Mr. Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' … Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply." (emphasis added)

I’m sure Vice President Cheney was referring to security issues, but it is amazing how similar that sounds to some Bush Administration behaviors in other areas. Consider the following as some examples.

At the UNGASS on AIDS several weeks ago, there was talk of the US delegation requesting the removal of the phrase “evidence-based” from the final political declaration (though they did not object to it in the end).

The Bush Administration CDC entirely rewrote its fact sheet on condoms, removing significant research that contradicted the supposed wisdom of abstinence-only-until-marriage education.

Federally funded abstinence-only curricula were found in a 2004 Congressional committee review to contain significant errors in fact, not to mention judgment. Mandatory spending requirements for the President’s international HIV/AIDS program push money to similar education programs, which the Government Accountability Office found to be hindering successful HIV/AIDS prevention work in developing countries.

Despite a decades-long track record as the most successful multilateral family planning organization in the world, the Bush Administration has withheld Congressionally-approved funding for UNFPA year after year because of accusations that have been undermined multiple times, including by a State Department investigation conducted under former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The portion of UNFPA’s budget withheld by the Administration each year could potentially save upwards of 75,000 maternal and infant lives each year, and beyond that, could fund additional contraception and other family planning services, preventing 2 million unwanted pregnancies a year – and 800,000 abortions, something the Bush Administration claims to care about deeply.

By Vice President Cheney’s own words, “our response” is what matters, not “our analysis.” Doesn’t that seem to be the case… If analysis mattered at all in the above situations, it would have been sensible to take the opposite course of action from what has actually happened. But if the above are symbols of this Administration’s all-important “response” to reproductive health issues, what exactly are they responding to? It doesn’t appear to be science, or the need for factual education (what other kind should there be?), or the need for saving lives, or even their desire to stop abortions.

This website has consistently argued that ideological commitments that pay little or no respect to scientific evidence are driving many Bush Administration policies on reproductive health. With Mr. Suskind’s new insights and Vice President Cheney’s own words, we may have been given a new understanding of why sound and proven public health strategies have repeatedly been ignored over the last 5 years: they simply might not matter in this Administration’s framework.

One thing does appears to matter –the ideology of a radically conservative electoral base. And at that point, the “response” has been consistent, even predictable. There doesn't appear to be another explanation that fits as well.