There’s a juicy article in today’s Times about the testimony of former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, who appeared before a Congressional panel on Tuesday. He told the panel “that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.” In other words, he echoed the sentiments of former members of every Bush-era government agency that has anything to do with science.

A couple of things stuck out at me as I read this piece. The first was the sheer pettiness of the administration’s attempts to inject politics into every facet of every office:

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.

“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’” Dr. Carmona said.

The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.

When asked after the hearing if that “prominent family” was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, “You said it. I didn’t.”

Pretty amazing stuff, even by Bush administration standards. I was also irked by the fact that Carmona had severe misgivings about the administration’s manipulation of science but waited until he was out of office to voice them. This seems to be another occurrence of Colin Powell Syndrome – someone with integrity sees the nonsensical inner workings of the Bush administration, is profoundly disturbed by them, but plays the “good soldier” until he or she is out of office.

“On issue after issue, Dr. Carmona said, the administration made decisions about important public health issues based solely on political considerations, not scientific ones.” Yes, I’m glad we’re hearing this. But how much more powerful would Carmona’s voice have been (or Powell’s, for that matter) if he had resigned at a crucial moment and laid out his criticisms in a press conference?

Irrelevant after-point: “Before being nominated, he was in the Army Special Forces, earned two purple hearts in the Vietnam War and was a trauma surgeon and leader of the Pima County, Ariz., SWAT team.” A trauma surgeon and the leader of a SWAT team! How awesome is that?