Tony Bennett: A Lysenko for our times ... and corrupt, to boot.

Every single time Tony Bennett's name comes up, I think back to Trofim Lysenko.

Howey, Bennett, Lysenko and Daniels.

I'll make this point a final time: Tony Bennett is one hell of a crooner, but he didn't invent the strategy of cooking the numbers to suit ideological imperatives. It isn't for nothing that I've been comparing amok Bennettism with the crazed genetics theories of Soviet half-scientist Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenkoism is a synonym for "scientific quackery."

Lysenkoism

Under Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology. Lysenko's methods were not condemned by the Soviet scientific community until 1965, more than a decade after Stalin's death.

In the Courier-Journal, via TheStatehouseFile.com, John Krull hammers a few more coffin nails. As for Bennett's future, I wonder if they're hiring greeters at Wal-Mart?

Bennett, a train wreck in slow motion

 ... It turns out that, if the inspector general's investigators are to be believed, there was a great deal of evidence that Bennett and his team used state time, state employees, state equipment and state money to help him run his doomed re-election campaign. Among the highlights, it appears Bennett routinely used state computers to store his campaign databases, traveled to campaign and political events using state vehicles and state drivers and made campaign fundraising phone calls on state time ...

... Despite the fact that Indiana's education leadership structure is in shambles and the evidence that he bent or broke both rules and the law willy-nilly is piled high enough to reach skyscraper proportions, Bennett and the members of his dwindling amen corner still insist he did nothing wrong.

Strangely, Bennett and his partisans actually seem to believe what they're saying.

And the fact that they can't see just how wrong they were may explain how they made such a mess of the state's education system and got themselves into so much trouble.