[A]lthough most Americans believe that their Surgeon General has the ability to impact the course of public health as “the nation’s doctor,” the reality is that the nation’s doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget, and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas. Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried.
He was prevented from speaking about stem cell research, contraception and abstinence-only sex education. And this wasn’t just some dope, but Bush’s own guy, who served from 2002-6.
What in the hell is wrong with these people, that they serve and leave silently? Thanks for nothing, Dr. Carmona.
Carmona provides some explanation of why he didn’t go public with his experience before now:
White House Muzzled Me, Carmona Says
I don’t think it’s fair to criticize Dr. Carmona in the same way we might criticize Colin Powell for playing “loyal soldier” for so long. Unlike Powell, Carmona had never moved among Washington political circles and had basically no idea what he was in for as, essentially, a pawn of Roveian politics. He seems to have genuinely believed that the office of Surgeon General was a place where he could perform useful public service–and in fact he did, with his sponsorship of the second-hand smoke report.
There can be fewer places where the Bush administration’s please-the-base-at-all-costs strategy has backfired than in the relations they’ve had with the scientific community. I’m of a generation that remembers when attacks on science and scientists more often than not came from one part or another of the New Left, who dismissed scientific knowledge as “hegemonic” and “phallocentric”, or from the animal-rights crowd or anti-nuclear activists. But for six years the White House has treated the scientific community as dismissible, dispensable, and ignorable, so it’s no wonder if they have thoroughly alienated a demographic that in the past tended to be more reliably conservative than many of their academic peers in the humanities and social sciences.
For that matter, the Bush administration has thoroughly alienated much of the community of professional historians, owing primarily to its attempt to keep as many documents as possible secret and non-public, as well its its annual zeroing out of the budget for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, whose mission is archival preservation of the documentary history of the country. So far Congress has ignored the White House and restored their budget line each year. These are not your “let’s forget about the dead white men” historians, these are precisely the people whose first love is the canonical history of the Founding Fathers, and they’ve essentially been betrayed by Administration policy.
At least the White House is leaving historians one genuine gift: it will take many years and many tenure-earning books to properly analyze the Byzantine convolutions of the Bush administration.