An emerging whodunit in Central Oregon hovers amid the smoke draping the east side of the Cascade Range. Can it be pure coincidence, locals are asking, that two wildfires sprang up in view of the spot where President Bush planned to promote his plan to thin forests for wildfire prevention?

Mark Wilson sends in this story from The Oregonian. Here are a couple more paragraphs—

…This much is known: No lightning that might have sparked fires had struck the area for at least 11 days before the twin blazes were sighted, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland. The Central Oregon Dispatch Center in Prineville first suggested lightning had hit a few days before, but meteorologists checked records and dispelled that.

…Lightning starts about 15 percent of wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. People start the rest.

Now, I don’t really believe that Bush’s advance team started forest fires to sex up his photo op. But plenty of Oregonians seem to, and why is that? Would they have suspected any other president of such a thing? Even those two famous liars, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson?

Jimmy Breslin of Newsday examines the moral miasma rising off Washington in a column called “The Air is Thick with Lies.” A sample:

I sit here in New York and I don’t believe one single solitary word of what the government says. Can you believe anything Bush says? Only if you're a rank sucker. Then you put that Rumsfeld on and he grimaces and tells you the first thing he thinks of, and here is Powell, who I thought would be our first black national candidate and he's as bad as the rest of them…