It’s not enough that it has finally been brought out in the open that former Environmental Protection Agency head, Christie Todd Whitman, felt she had to quit her post—not to spend more time with her family, as she originally said— but because she couldn’t in good conscience lie down and play dead when Dick Cheney insisted she ease air pollution controls.
It’s not enough that we learned a few weeks earlier, that the woman who was overseeing the Endangered Species Act, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Julie MacDonald, has been found to have personally reversed scientific findings, changed scientific conclusions to prevent endangered species from receiving protection.
Now on Tuesday morning we hear (in testimony before a Henry Waxman-headed Congressional panel) the exceptionally creepy tale told by Dr. Richard Carmona, the Bush-appointed U.S. Surgeon General from 2002 to 2006, who says he was asked repeatedly to ignore, stifle, or change what he knew about science and public health in order to satisfy the Bush administration’s political agenda. (Here are links to stories by the NY Times, Reuters, and the LA Times.)
A few of the highlights of Carmona’s testimony include the following forehead-slapping, bile-raising revelations:
The administration insisted that all reference to any of the facts surrounding stem cell research be removed from Carmona’s speeches.
When Carmona was asked to speak about teenage pregnancy, he was told he could only talk about abstinence, not the pros and cons of sex education.
The Bush administration first delayed for years, then tried to substantially water down, a report on the real effect of second hand smoke. (It was one of the few battles that Carmona finally won.)
Administration officials all but ordered Carmona not to attend the Special Olympics. Why? Because……the Kennedy’s were longtime supporters of the program.
He was told not to speak about or issue a report on the state of health care in US prisons— because, said Carmona, the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners’ health care.
“For us, the science was pretty easy,” said Dr. Carmona. “These people go back into the community and take diseases with them. This is not about the crime. It’s about protecting the public.”
Evidently not for the Bush Administration.
Confused about how to handle the repeated conflict he encountered between science and bald-faced partisanship, Carmona reached out to six of his predecessors. It was Dr. Everett Koop, he said, the eccentric former Surgeon General who served under Reagan, who best summed up the consensus of the other six: “We have never seen it as partisan, as malicious, as vindictive, as mean-spirited as it is today..”
Oh, bull. Every political appointment is political. What a surprise. This guy is just sour grapes, and it is now the Democrats who are politicizing that position with its hearings. Oh, didn’t think of that, huh?
Do you think that the Democrats would appoint a Surgeon General who raised the medical dangers of abortions and anal sex? Heck no. But, they appointed one who claimed that AIDS could be fought through masturbation and that this should be taught in the schools.
Give me a break.
Scientists
U.S. doctors and scientists led the Eugenics movement, scientifically stating that sterilization could help rid society of mental illness and crime. They launched a 20th century eugenics movement that paralleled the policies of Nazi Germany.
Scientific studies in Eugenics aimed at improving society through selective breeding. State-authorized sterilizations were carried on a large scale in the United States beginning with the first state eugenics law in Indiana in 1907.
Sterilization was carried out on more than 40,000 people classed as insane or “feebleminded” in 30 states by 1944. Another 22,000 underwent sterilization from the mid-1940s to 1963,
German and American eugenics scientists both believed science could solve social problems, Numerous scientific studies were publicized in the New England journal and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The U.S. practice of neutering “mentally defective” individuals was backed by most leading (SCIENTISTS) geneticists who measured the worth of the individual in economic terms and felt mental illness a threat to society grave enough to warrant compulsive sterilization.
Morality is more important that Science, however business is not.
RX – Needs new backbone
“the good doctor could have done what some of his predecessors chose to do: Speak up anyway, and face the consequences, such as being fired. C. Everett Koop did that on AIDS during the Reagan Administration and became a hero to the media establishment that had once dismissed him as an anti-abortion zealot. Joycelyn Elders also chose to use her pulpit to endorse creative sex education in public schools, at least until the Clinton Administration asked her to resign.”