It's Hard to Trust the Uninformed

It’s no secret that I deeply distrust the practices of the Bush Administration. In a previous post I was challenged to provide an argument to explicitly justify this lack of trust. Although I’m convinced that my posts on this blog over the last three months have sufficiently supported my claim, I feel like I have to be clear about this.

I recently had an enlightening discussion about environmental policy. Like other campaign promises in 2000 (think nation building), Bush reversed his promise to reduce dangerous CO2 emissions. Now, I know next to nothing about issues addressed by environmental policies (something tells me that Bush doesn’t either). I know that discussions about the environment have taken a back seat since 9/11 in this country and I know that this accounts for a large gap between European and US relations. Bush has since agreed that there is warming, but does not share the imminent desire to address the problem with the rest of the world. This is a topic that I really hope the more knowledgeable among you will address in this post.

My point:

Although campaign reversals are good reasons not to trust somebody, there’s another reason that makes me distrust Bush more than other politicians. To demonstrate, here’s a quote from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director, James Hansen, on Bush and global warming

“In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now.”

This is the type of quote that lies at the core of my distrust. Over the last term, I read about or heard from too many people—important people—who claim that there’s an active information filter working hard to keep Bush’s policies afloat. Here’s another quote from the same MSNBC article:

“Hansen said the administration wants to hear only scientific results that fit predetermined, inflexible positions.”

I disagree with Bush’s policies on just about everything. Although I’d like to say that I disagree because of differences of core principles, most of the reason, unfortunately, is because of their treatment of useful information.

Is that not a good enough reason to distrust them?