Wonderland on the Potomac

Herewith two items that lend further credence to my belief that the Bush administration operates in an Alice in Wonderland-like bubble where common sense is routinely turned on its ear:

* Sooner or latter, Dick Cheney would have to come out of hiding on the matter of Scooter Libby, his indicted former chief of staff, testifying that it was the vice president himself who authorized he and other White House officials to out CIA agent Valerie Plame in conversations with journalists.

But as conditioned as I may have become to the serial excuse making, obfuscating and outright lying of the Bush administration, I was unprepared for Cheney’s defense, which is right out of the Red Queen’s playbook:

Cheney says that he was authorized to declassify secret information because he has a secret clearance from a secret executive order to do so.

(Steve Clemons at The Washington Note does a terrific job of parting the mists on this whopper by pointing to the pertinent executive order and noting that it only mentions the vice president in passing and in no way gives him permission to out secret agents.)

* Meanwhile, over at NASA, a bevy of Cheshire Cats was hard at work during the 2004 president campaign.

Doing what?

Cutting the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences to help play into the Bush administration’s view that global warming is much ado about nothing.