The surgeon general, Jerry Nadler, etc
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...
...Oh, the scandal...
...As National Review's Ramesh Pon-nuru 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...
...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...
...Nadler argued that a suspected enemy combatant can't be treated any different than a criminal...
...The fact is that I'm not saying [Sept...
...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...
...And if we can—when we captured mass murderers in the United States, we did the same...
...Keith Ellison, D-Nutball Democratic congressman Keith Ellison of Minneapolis is commonly described as the first Muslim in Congress...
...Well, bully for him...
...House of Representatives...
...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...
...The Very Model of a Pre-9/11 Pol Give credit to Democratic Rep...
...What Waxman calls "political interference" is the normal carrying out by the executive branch of the policies of the duly elected chief executive...
...For example, he supported comprehensive sex education that would include abstinence in the curriculum, rather than focusing solely on abstinence...
...He serves at the pleasure of the president as a spokesman of the Public Health Service...
...Berenson continued: "—no interrogation, no intelligence, and the World Trade coming down—" Nadler: "That's exactly right...
...Actually, the headline jumps the gun...
...As reported in the Minneapolis StarTribune, 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...
...That would get you some headlines...
...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 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...
...Our advice to aspiring alarmists: Poison ivy just ain't scary enough...
...Anyone reminded of the Reichstag fire by 9/11 has already put himself in the nutball box...
...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...
...Wax-man, 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...
...Sorry, Congressman, that rhetorical get-out-of-jail-free card you flourish there won't trump the insinuations preceding it...
...The destruction of the World Trade Center is "almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that," said Ellison...
...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...
...But for the curious bureaucratic genealogy, the position would more accurately be described as deputy to the assistant secretary of health for communications...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Jer-rold Nadler of New York...
...So much for preempting terrorist attacks...
...But his speeches were edited by political appointees, and he was told not to talk about certain issues...
...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...
...This change hasn't actually been observed in nature...
...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...
...We captured Charles Manson or other mass murderers...
...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...
...Indeed, Carmona's agenda was 99 and 44/100 percent pure Globaloney: Recognize and plan for the fact that tomorrow's best hope to achieve millennium goals, extinguish asymmetries, eradicate social injustices, and make the world [a] healthier, safer and more secure place may be the newer, softer force projection of health diplomacy via prospective ongoing sustainable missions globally...
...Put some Venus Flytraps under your grow-light, pump in higher concentrations of CO2, and see if they'll devour small pets...
...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...
...Concludes Ponnuru: "The Bush administration emerges from the Car-mona story looking bad, all right—for having appointed this guy in the first place...
...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...
...As the AP summarized: "Carmona said he believed the surgeon general should show leadership on health issues...
...Climate Changes Are Making Poison Ivy More Potent," reports the Wall Street Journal of June 26...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 42
