Open Inquiry Quotes
Note the language used to describe the American government at the time. To the founders, it was an EXPERIMENT. Nothing like that had ever been tried before. And none of them were sure it would work. After defeating the British, they could have chosen for their new independent nation any one of dozens of well-established forms of government. But these were all flawed. So they risked the new nation on a form that had little or no precedent and might or might not survive. Centuries later many national leaders and legislators were fearful to try anything that they were not highly certain would be effective. Experiments were rare until there were crises so great that none of the orthodox solutions would be sufficient, and even then the innovators were criticized such as with Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were candid enough to admit that they were experimenting. FDR in particular announced experimentation as a policy with rapid change for the experiments that did not work out of which there were several.
The George W. Bush administration was a very ideological one as opposed to pragmatic. They would not tolerate public officials who would say anything that might undermine an administrative ideological position. In particular, they did not want government scientists releasing any data or information that was not totally consistent with their ideology and program. They introduced a new policy within the government whereby no one could talk to a reporter or make a public speech or deliver a professional paper without first getting approval of administration “public affairs” agents first. Government scientists and other officials had never before been censored like this. Important scientific studies were not made public where they might not support the administration ideological positions. Hanson spoke out against the policy at great embarrassment to the administration. See {614691}.
