WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the House Science Committee on Tuesday defended his controversial draft legislation that would subject the National Scie...

The United States finds itself in an odd political predicament. One of its two major political parties is increasingly dominated by a faction of people that simply denies those aspects of reality it finds to be inconvenient.

The Olympia Snowes of the world can complain all they want about the lack of middle ground. But plaints like this misapprehend fundamentally the dynamics of American politics. We're polarized largely because one party -- Snowe's own -- has simply gone off the deep end.

What's bracing to see in 2011 is that facts themselves represent the same impediment for conservatives that political correctness did two decades ago -- as an appalling constraint on the right's God-given right to unabashed condemnation.