A General We’re Not Going to Salute
The surgeon general, despite the fancy title and the uniform that makes him look like the drum major for a Paraguayan military marching band, is not in fact a terribly powerful federal official–and hasn’t been for more than half a century. He serves at the pleasure of the president as a spokesman of the Public Health Service. For its part, the Public Health Service is under the direct supervision of the assistant secretary for health, a high-ranking functionary in the Department of Health and Human Services, to whom the surgeon general reports.
But for the curious bureaucratic genealogy, the position would more accurately be described as deputy to the assistant secretary of health for communications. And were it so labeled, Richard Carmona, the Bush appointee who held the position from 2002-2006, would not have made the headlines he did last week, slagging his former colleagues in the Bush administration before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform–aka California Democrat Henry Waxman’s star chamber.
“The reality,” whined Carmona, “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.” As the AP summarized: “Carmona said he believed the surgeon general should show leadership on health issues. But his speeches were edited by political appointees, and he was told not to talk about certain issues. For example, he supported comprehensive sex education that would include abstinence in the curriculum, rather than focusing solely on abstinence.”
Well, bully for him. But “the reality” is that he was only the “nation’s doctor” metaphorically speaking–the paychecks he cashed were cut by the administration that hired him. Waxman, obviously pleased with his witness, complained that “political interference with the work of the surgeon general appears to have reached a new level in this administration.”
Oh, the scandal! The administration has high-ranking political appointees supervising the work of less-high-ranking political appointees, ensuring that, as representatives of the president, they further the policies of the president. What Waxman calls “political interference” is the normal carrying out by the executive branch of the policies of the duly elected chief executive.
Carmona’s real beef seems to be that he ended up in an administration whose views he disagreed with–he presumably would have been happier serving under a President Henry Waxman.
As National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out last week, “Carmona’s own view of the proper role of a surgeon general suggests that he was in serious need of muzzling.” Indeed, Carmona’s agenda was 99 and 44/100 percent pure Globaloney:
Concludes Ponnuru: “The Bush administration emerges from the Carmona story looking bad, all right–for having appointed this guy in the first place.”
The Very Model of a Pre-9/11 Pol
Give credit to Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York. Sometimes referred to as the Congressman from Ground Zero (his district includes lower Manhattan), Nadler is an honest lawyer, not afraid to follow his civil libertarian premises to their proper, if somewhat alarming, conclusion.
At a June 26 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, former associate White House counsel Brad Berenson was defending the position of the Bush administration that (a) we are engaged in a war with al Qaeda, not a police investigation of an international criminal conspiracy, and therefore (b) there are al Qaeda members who do not enjoy the habeas corpus rights of citizens and who may be detained as enemy combatants without criminal charges being filed.
Nadler argued that a suspected enemy combatant can’t be treated any different than a criminal. Berenson cut to the chase: That “means if we had captured Mohamed Atta on September 10th, we would have had no choice but to treat him as a criminal defendant, which would have–”
Nadler jumped in: “That’s exactly right.”
Berenson continued: “–no interrogation, no intelligence, and the World Trade coming down–”
Nadler: “That’s exactly right. And if we can–when we captured mass murderers in the United States, we did the same. We captured Charles Manson or other mass murderers.”
So much for preempting terrorist attacks.
Keith Ellison, D-Nutball
Democratic congressman Keith Ellison of Minneapolis is commonly described as the first Muslim in Congress. He is also (as Scott Johnson tirelessly reported at Powerline.com and in these pages) the first acolyte of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan in Congress, and his taste for extremist conspiracy-mongering has not abated since his election to the U.S. House of Representatives.
As reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Ellison addressed an enthusiastic group of supporters, Atheists for Human Rights, on July 8, giving credence to the left-wing paranoiacs who blame 9/11 on the Bush administration and compare Bush to Hitler.
The destruction of the World Trade Center is “almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that,” said Ellison. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I’m not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that’s how they put you in the nutball box–dismiss you.”
Sorry, Congressman, that rhetorical get-out-of-jail-free card you flourish there won’t trump the insinuations preceding it. Anyone reminded of the Reichstag fire by 9/11 has already put himself in the nutball box.
Little Shop of Horrors II
THE SCRAPBOOK, busy working through a pile of newspapers that stacked up during our summer vacation, just came across the latest entry in the parade of horribles that await us in our brave new globally warmed world: super poison ivy.
“Climate Changes Are Making Poison Ivy More Potent,” reports the Wall Street Journal of June 26. Actually, the headline jumps the gun. This change hasn’t actually been observed in nature. But when grown in the laboratory, poison ivy plants treated to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide–the plant-friendly gas whose presence in the atmosphere is increasing–get lusher and more poisonous.
Left out of the flurry of initial reporting on the new study was the common sense point that higher carbon dioxide levels are to all plants like catnip to cats. Full credit to the Chicago Tribune‘s John Kass, who elicited that elementary bit of context from USDA plant physiologist Lewis Ziska: “Carbon dioxide can make wheat and soybean and rice grow–that’s the positive side,” he told Kass.
Our advice to aspiring alarmists: Poison ivy just ain’t scary enough. Put some Venus Flytraps under your grow-light, pump in higher concentrations of CO2, and see if they’ll devour small pets. That would get you some headlines.
