Politics & Power Quote by Andrew Greeley

A priest posing a moral problem that feels like a trap: pick your poison, liar or fool. Greeley rigs the question to force a brutal admission about modern power. We pretend our outrage is about deception, but his real target is incompetence dressed up as innocence. A president who lies “deliberately” at least possesses agency; a president “taken in” by intelligence agencies is worse because he’s not steering the ship, just riding the current of bureaucracy, ideology, and wishful thinking.

The line “especially those who told him what he wanted to hear” is the knife. It shifts blame from the faceless “deep state” to the oldest human weakness: confirmation bias. Greeley’s subtext is that intelligence failures are rarely neutral accidents; they’re co-productions between leaders hungry for certainty and institutions happy to supply it. The president becomes less villain than customer, shopping for a casus belli and calling it “being briefed.”

Context matters. Written in the long shadow of Vietnam and freshly relevant after the Iraq WMD debacle, the question echoes a cultural moment when “bad intelligence” became the polite euphemism for war sold on shaky premises. Greeley, as a clergyman, is also smuggling in a theological concern: sin isn’t only malicious intent, it’s abdication. The most dangerous leader may be the one who can claim clean hands because he never really held the wheel.