corrente

CBS via Reuters via WaPo here:

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts Friday from a CBS interview.

O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour.

"As I recall it was just a monologue," he told CBS' "60 Minutes," which will broadcast the entire interview Sunday.

In making the blind man analogy, O'Neill told CBS his ex-boss did not encourage a free flow of ideas or open debate.

"There is no discernible connection," CBS quoted O'Neill as saying. The president's lack of engagement left his advisers with "little more than hunches about what the president might think," O'Neil said, according to the program.

Interesting.

So Bush either talks, or doesn't listen. Sound familiar? And what's he doing when he's not listening? Praying? Replaying fond memories of torturing small animals? Truly, truly weird ...

The CBS video is here. Interestingly, several articles in the current Atlantic (on the stands, but not yet online) make the same point about the inner workings of the Bush administration: They don't listen. And Howard Dean points out the same thing:

"This administration is ideologically driven, not fact-driven. As a doctor, I know that if you have a theory and you have a fact, and the fact comes along and disproves the theory, you throw the theory out. The problem is these guys throw the fact out."

Yep. "What difference does it make?" "It" being a fact ...