In Louisiana, politics keeps getting in the way of science: Jarvis DeBerry

is the Jindal administration willing to accept criticism that its plans for sand berms and rock dikes don’t meet scientific rigor? You be the judge:

“No one can convince us that rocks in the water are more dangerous than oil,” Jindal said in a speech in New Orleans on Tuesday. “That is absolutely ridiculous. The only people who believe that are the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who can’t see the oil, smell the oil or touch the oil.”

Denise Reed, a wetlands specialist and director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, works in New Orleans, not Washington, and she’s not a bureaucrat. She told The Times-Picayune the state’s plan could result in “additional erosion and more pathways for oil to move in from the Gulf.” She told The New York Times, “There was very strong scientific backing for not doing this. This could really devastate our barrier shoreline, our first line of defense.”

If the scientists are wrong, the governor and his administration officials ought to be able to counter them in a way that still acknowledges their expertise. But Jindal — whose Rhodes scholarship is well in his rearview — seems more interested in playing the role of the populist anti-intellectual. And one of the first rules of populist anti-intellectualism is to connect an opponent to Washington and accuse him or her of being a dreaded bureaucrat. Jindal seems unconcerned that some of his critics are local scientists and that he’s a former bureaucrat himself.