Just when I think things cannot get any weirder as far as the Bush Administration's policy development and decision process is concerned:

The New Republic Online: &c.: THE RETURN OF PAUL O'NEILL: Thanks to Jim VandeHei's excellent article in today's Washington Post, we now have two competing explanations for why the White House quietly inserted several hundred billion dollars worth of tax-free savings accounts into its budget.

On the one hand, the tactical advantages make the proposal almost irresistible: While extremely radical--the savings accounts would take us very far down the road of exempting all investment income from taxation--they happen to look pretty innocuous, at least on their face. In fact, the proposal would actually generate revenue for the government in the short-term--from the capital gains tax people paid when they cashed out their existing IRAs and moved the money into the new accounts. True, in the long-run the tens of thousands of dollars people could accumulate tax-free in these accounts would blow a hole in the budget the size of W.'s Crawford ranch. But Crawford is exactly where the president will be by the time that happens.

Alternatively, there's the administration's claim, put forth in response to skepticism from House Republican leaders like Dennis Hastert and Rob Portman, that the proposal was all one big secret plot by former Treasury secretary and renowned evil genius Paul O'Neill. Administration officials argue that O'Neill, in VandeHei's words, "developed the idea in secret and froze key lawmakers, such as Hastert and Portman, out of the decision-making process." For the record, this is the same Paul O'Neill so out of the White House loop he didn't realize he was going to be fired--after months and months of rumors predicting exactly that--until Dick Cheney called him up in November to tell him. Even if the proposal was O'Neill's idea, which is entirely possible since he was known to be working on this sort of thing, since when do White Houses let ousted Cabinet officials make decisions about what will and won't go in their budgets, particularly ousted Cabinet officials they didn't listen to in the first place?

Now maybe both explanations are equally plausible. But we have our suspicions.