Iraq continues south, while everyone in the administration swears the surge is already working. No real evidence of that, but there ya go. Valerie Plame testified before congress that she was covert.
Yet, way in the background, a minor scandal is brewing.
International Herald Tribune:
A House committee has released documents that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil-industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty or play down evidence of a human role in global warming.
In a hearing Monday of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip Cooney defended the changes he made in government reports over several years, saying the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President George W. Bush by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2001.
They were the first public statements on the issue by Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House, Cooney was the climate team leader for the American Petroleum Institute, the main oil industry lobby in Washington.
Cooney resigned in 2005 and guess where he went to work? Exxon. I'd argue that, even while he was working for the Bush administration, he never actually stopped working for big oil. He was just getting paid by taxpayers for a little while.
According to IHT, Cooney told congress, "When I came to the White House, my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration." That may very well be true, but we learned a long, long time ago that the two are synonymous. The Bush White House is an extension of the oil industry.
I've written before about how the Bush White House is just scandal after scandal after scandal. I find it hard to believe that there's a single honest person in the administration. The impulse is always to the underhanded, the dishonest, the criminal.
Which means that they don't give a damn about you. It's not only congress and investigators that they lie to -- they're also lying to you. That shrinking club of the incredibly gullible who still support Bushco is being lied to. Cheney probably lies to Bush, Bush lies to Gonzales, Gonzales lies to Rove. When it's all about lies and coverups, no one has decent information and government fails.
This is why the Bush administration has been so freakin' incompetent. No one told anyone what they really thought would happen in Iraq -- that might've slowed things down. Collin Powell was given BS to present to the UN. When private contractors began to fail to meet the needs of survivors of hurricane Katrina, the kneejerk reaction was a coverup. As far as anyone knew, Brownie was doing a heck of a job. The problem with the Bushies is that they're all so secretive and dishonest that none of them know what the hell is really going on. They blind themselves and call it leadership.
So it's nothing new to learn that they were editing climate science reports. It's just what they do. Despite all evidence that this is about the absolute worst way to run a railroad, this is the way they're going to continue to do things.
--Wisco
