Bush, the Anti-Information President

Since I am already on record as being perhaps the first person (years ago) to suggest that George Bush will be remembered as the Worst President in U.S. History, I haven’t said much lately, figuring, wrongly of course, how much more damage can be done in the last year or so?

There are several things I never expected to be true of the future, as I was growing up. One, for example, was that we would never return to the moon, or to Mars, with further manned explorations. If you had suggested this to me then, I would have bet you any amount of money you were wrong.

Another is that we, as a nation, would somehow be engaged, on any serious level, in a discussion about whether the Earth was created in six literal days, whether evolution is real and should be taught in school, and whether, in general, science is only “half the story.”

Science is nothing but accumulated knowledge, so it is hard to put it aside; even so, it seems that giving science, giving accumulated knowledge, a bad name, has been at the top of the list for this “faith-based” administration.

Having faith, of any kind, does not permit you to ignore knowledge. Why the two even conflict, if they do, is a separate, and unrelated, question.

How an administration can have a consistent anti-knowledge knee-jerk response to problems, is one of those things I just never thought I would see. Is knowledge bad? Are known facts not to be trusted? The Bolsheviks killed all of the intellilgentsia at the outset of the Russian revolution. Dictators, from Lenin and Stalin to Putin today, are uneasy with scientists and intelligent people, and often kill them first among a longer list of enemies of the state.

Today we learned that, once again, the Bush administration has actively edited science and knowledge out of administration testimony to Congress; in this case, by CDC head Julie Gerberding on the issue of the health costs of global warming. The story was carried by the AP wire, time.com and others, and printed in most major newspapers.

It appears that half of Gerberding’s report, detailing the problems we will all face as a result of global warming, were removed by Bush censors before she was allowed to give her speech. She joins past heads of the EPA, climate officers at NASA, financial officers in charge of health care costs, and many others in the administration who were prevented from telling us, the people, the truth. The government literally is preventing our employees from telling us what is best for us, preventing them from sharing their knowledge with us, not because it’s classified, or even wrong, but because they don’t like it.

These people, who seem to believe that the laws passed by Congress do not apply to them, also seem to believe that they have the right to control knowledge, even as they evesdrop on us without warrants to hear what we think.

It’s time for people to get angry, on the floor of Congress, in public, at work, at home. And in the media (did you know that 60 people, out of an unknown larger number, were just arrested in a protest at the White House against “the War and Warming”? I doubt it.)

George Bush, the anti-information president, the anti-Congress president, the anti-Constitution president, the anti-people president.

Impeach Bush and Cheney, before it is too late.