Former Surgeon General Says He Was Muzzled

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestmailby feather

As if you needed another reason to loath George Bush’s administration and all that they stand for, today we have this revelation:

U.S. surgeon general appointed by President George W. Bush accused the administration on Tuesday of political interference and muzzling him on key issues like embryonic stem cell research.

“Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the nation’s top doctor from 2002 until 2006, told a House of Representatives committee.

“The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds. The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party,” Carmona added.

Source: nytimes.com

Yeah. It was that bad.

He was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of every speech he gave, Dr. Carmona said. He was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings, at least one of which included Karl Rove, the president’s senior political adviser, he said.

Source: nytimes.com (a different article)

The print version of this article (which I read this morning over coffee and cannot find online now) also discusses how Clinton tried to squash a report on the success of needle exchange programs in combating the spread of communicable disease. I will not defend the actions of the Clinton Administration on these pages. Anyone who tries to keep good science from seeing the light of day for short sighted political purposes is in the wrong.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestmailby feather

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

3 Replies to “Former Surgeon General Says He Was Muzzled”

  1. Ok

    Total crap

    This dude could have said anything at any time. He had nothing to loose, just another lame / duck / I mean doc / ….politician

  2. i also heard Clinton asked the SG not to discuss safe sex in schools during the Monica debacle.

  3. Carmona shot and killed a crazy guy a few blocks from my house, about 6 years ago or so.