open to dissent?

Anybody who believes the hiring of Henry Paulson as Treasury Secretary or Tony Snow as press spokesman means the White House is going to be more open to dissenters is falling for a Rovian line of BS. If they'd asked Paulson, who has spoken out about the need to fight climate change, to head the Environmental Protection Agency, that would be news. But he's going to be focusing on financial stuff, not the environment.

Come back in six months and see if Paulson or Snow are really making any difference, and if the dissent they had occasionally voiced in public BEFORE joining the de facto Administration has continued. Somehow, I doubt it. As this article noted, de facto President and Decider in Chief Bush thinks certitude is a virtue, and he isn't prone to changing his mind.

Consistency, the hobgoblins of small minds. They don't come much smaller than Bush's.