Your Cooney

So now we have the strange and disturbing tale of Philip A. Cooney, former oil industry lobbyist and crusader, now a “White House official,” who took it upon himself to doctor government reports on fossil fuel emissions and global warming to make them more palatable to the presidential ear, and more in conformity with the presidential agenda.

Here’s what puzzles me, Bush: are you the perpetrator or the victim in all this? The manipulator or the dupe? I mean, there’s only two ways to look at this. It could be that you’re the puppet of some dark, corporate cartel, which saw to your election and your re-election with their money and their influence and power, and now sets the agenda to suit their nefarious purposes. In which case, this Philip A. Cooney would be a kind of mole, planted strategically in your administration, with orders to skew the information you receive to the advantage of the oil business.

The second alternative is scarcely preferable. It would mean that you, Bush, in your wisdom, set the agenda, and make the kind of appointments that are sure to serve your interests and needs. They know what you want to hear, and happily provide it.

It is getting to be something of a pattern, isn’t it? Perhaps the most egregious example is the lead-up to the war in Iraq, when you received—and passed on, duplicitously, to the American people—precisely the information spectacularly skewed to support your barely concealed lust to take us all to war.

And what about this Bolton? And those judges? Your agenda shines unambiguously through every one of your appointments. And what about your pronouncements on stem cell research? Are you getting good information there, or are you getting the information you planned for in advance?

Or is it all someone else’s agenda, Bush? And you just happen to be the convenient conduit? A frightening thought. Too paranoic, maybe. I'm not one to buy into conspiracy theories.

Either way, though, I personally would prefer to have a man in charge who demands nothing but the unadulterated truth from those whom he chooses to inform him, and who fires their ass without ceremony when they come up with anything less; not a man who hides behind the errors and misjudgments of others—whether purposeful or no—and fails even to chastise them when they serve him ill.

So which are you, Bush? The tyrant, who demands complete obedience to his whims? Or the dupe, who does the bidding of his handlers? I fail to see another reasonable possibility.