One of the challenges that we face in trying to expose the Ideology of Information is that the usual terms of attack don't seem to match up to it quite right.  If somebody's looking only at the information that supports a certain policy and willfully ignoring a mountain of debunking/contrary evidence, and then he goes out and loudly proclaims the stuff in the Useful box, do you get to say he lied?  Do you get to say he deceived you?  What happened in the first instance is that he deceived himself into believing something.  But once he's got himself to believe something, his expression of that belief can't count as a lie, since a liar has to say A while believing not-A.  

So what do we say about these people?  What neat and effective bumper-sticker terms are there?  After an extensive investigation that captures the attention of the country, we might be able to attack Republicans for not caring enough about Americans and American soldiers to consider all the risks and dangers that the Iraq War posed to them.  Maybe we could use talk like that to damage the Republicans' totally undeserved reputation as the national security party.  But until then, it's kind of hard to know what to say.  

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AUTHOR: Ottoe
DATE: 11/17/2005 03:12:44 PM

Neil:

Your question assumes a subjective definition of "lying," which may be true in law, but not necessarily in ethics (even among werewolves) or politics.  

"Truthfulness" is not just a matter of sincerity.  It also involves openness to objective reality and empirical evidence.  Those who systematically shut themselves off from both are "liars" as well, and as Mark suggests, are more dangerous than mere hypocrites and dissemblers.  

And that's why I agree with Mark's implicit argument that we shouldn't insist on proving that Bush and his gang knew they were lying.  Deception based on self-deception, when you are in charge of a multi-trillion dollar government and the most powerful military force on earth, is far worse than conscious mendacity.  

If you insist on a bumper sticker, how's about "The Right Is Mad About Being Wrong," or "The Truth Hurts Republicans."  

That's the best I can do on short notice, but you get the drift.    

regardless, he's the president, he's accountable, and if there's one thing that can't be delegated, it's accountability...

He takes the credit when it goes good and won't take responsibility if it goes wrong...we ain't dealing with Harry S. Truman here, lol!!  And btw...I think he is both stupid and a liar.  And the only reason he is pissed at Cheney, Rove et al is that they and their people were just as stupid by getting caught lying about Plamegate...definitely not pissed that they lied.

Mark,

I don't think that it follows that if Bush was misled then he is somewhat off the hook. I would agree with the reader that Bush probably wasn't aware of all the conflicting information on Iraq etc. That's because he's not interested in such stuff, has no capacity for the analysis needed and particularly when it goes against his preconceived ideas. Marshalling information and then coming to a decision isn't what Bush does nor does he want his advisors to so advise him.

Instead the Boy Emperor surrounds himself with advisors who tell him only what he wants to hear. That they may be misleading him is beside the point. Bush has no interest in the facts other than as they reinforce his position - essentially he wants to be misled in the direction he wants to go. It reminds me of King Rehoboam in Israel who appointed his friends to be his advisors.

Children, Intelligent Designers, and other people for whom critical thinking is anathema are only interested in evidence that supports what they believe - it's a case of "if you don't like this evidenence then I have other evidence." That's why Miers was the best possible candidate for SCOTUS and now Allito is.

He may be a liar. He may be stupid. But to extend more charity than I normally do to Bush, if he's not stupid, and not a liar, then at the very least he was ill-informed, and unaware of critical information, which would seem to disqualify him for the job he's (not) doing. I'm always amazed by people who choose defenses that make them look worse than admitting to the crime would.

What is rather depressing that at least in some quarters the ideology of information still holds sway.  In The New York Daily News there two letters of note.  One simply denied that Bush had ever lied.  The other letter took and earlier letter writer to task for calling for Bush's impeachment.  This writer suggested that Clinton had lied about serious matters while Bush had not lied at all.

Which is why it's not good to have a moron as POTUS. As Paul Begala once said Bush is in so far over his head "he's like Mini-Me at the bottom of the Grand Canyon."

The poor man-child, in his innocence led astray and betrayed by those he trusted.

Bullshit.

Bush is every bit as cynical and conniving as any petty thief.  It's his membership in the "lucky sperm" club that has allowed him to screw up every business that he has owned and profit handsomely on the sales to daddy's friends and backers.  He signed on to do a job, as the 70 million that he raised before he even announced his run attested to.  To think that he has been put in this position without culpability is naive at best.

I think Mr. Woodward will confirm my theory- that  Bush has been moving out those that can hang this albatross around his neck- hiding them in plain sight.  It will be interesting to see if the "present or former" administration official that Woodward names will be Wolfowitz, Bolton, or Harriet.  

This was my point exactly when I wrote Josh on 11-13 the following:

"Are we dealing with a plot out of a Robert Ludlum novel here?  Did Cheney see an opening by appointing himself as VP knowing that if this dumbshit Bush became president, he (Cheney) as VP, along with Rumsfeld and all the rest of the neo-con cabal, could talk Bush into anything they wanted because they could out-reason Bush on anything (being supremely more intelligent and knowledgeable).  They could therefore, if Bush could get elected, achieve ALL their dreams and aims by having direct control from the most powerful place of power in the world--the oval office of the US. "

Indeed, Bluebell, you are right; the sin is in the intention to deceive.  What was all the BS about mushroom clouds?  Condi and Cheney did not say there would be a mushroom cloud, but what was "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" about?

They never said outright that Saddam did 9/11, but they kept using 9/11 and Saddam in the same sentence.  Why did 69% of the people at one point think there was a link between the two?

The intention to deceive was there, and it's still there as B/C continue to attempt to deceive by saying that Americans have the right to disagree with the president, but when Democrats do it, they say they are undermining the troops.

Now I hope the people of the country are not buying the BS.  

Somewhere long ago I commented here, on another post, that I'm frightened not by what this adminstration says, nor by the fact that some Americans believe what they say. I'm frightened by the fact that THEY believe what they say.

In that view, observations (intelligence) that don't support the Conclusion aren't "Not Useful", they are wrong.

Washington has a history of crooks, liars, and cheats and we've survived them all. They aren't the ones that keep me up at night.

I find both Mark's original post and the comments interesting and often insightful. Yet, I marvel at how much emphasis is placed on not dealing with the reality that the person who is ultimately responsible for the principles that create the paradigms (sorry for the word but it fits) within which our government is conducted is George W. Bush.

One can parse how the various factions may have had influence, but the responsibility to establish the broad parameters belongs to the person of the president.

To illustrate, he could have said to Gonzales: "We do not torture. Tear up your memos." He didn't.

Whether invading Iraq was a good idea or not (I think it was stupid, but that's beside the point) GWB could have said "We will provide Congress and the American people with all the intelligence we have". He didn't.

I could go on but won't. My point is that isn't it time we stopped making excuses for the source of a disasterous time for a country, that however haltingly, had made enormous progress with great pain.

The source of the disaster is George W. Bush, the President. While the specific decisions are complex, the paradigms (there's that word again) within which they are made are fairly fundamental. Isn't it time people began to discuss this reality, including the reality that GWB has imeachment insurance in Cheney and Hassert? One can only laugh at the prediciment while calling attention to it.

Facing this reality explicitly may influence the current Congress but will certainly influence the next one.

If this is true, if Bush was fooled, and I know a lot of people believe that, then it kind of blows the "President as Delegator" argument that was used to elect Bush the first time right out of the water.  Honestly, the argument that a gullible President will be fine because he or she will surround themselves with smart people has always bothered the heck out of me.  I don't expect a president to be an expert in everything.  There is a need for specialists, after all.  But you don't have to be a genius to know when a specialist is giving you bad information or advice, do you?  Sure, I could be scammed by an automechanic, but I know enough that I could also, reasonably, catch one in a lie, or I could at least ask enough right questions that I wouldn't be the easiest mark in the room.

 It's not enough to have advisors.  You have to manage those advisors.  I'm a journalist.  I submit stories to editors.  I've done the reporting.  I know more about the story than my editor does.  But my editor knows what to ask and can tell when I'm shaky on a fact even though I've done the research and they haven't.

Any president can be misled but they're still responsible.  It's still a failure.  Not being misled is part of the job, isn't it? 

"they know full well that what they're doing is not perceived as acceptable by the culture."

That is true of the entire conservative movement. That is why they have to lie, fake being moderate, and conceal the reasons they are actually doing things.

They have never been honest about why they had to invade Iraq. They know they will have no support for that kind of thing outside the conservative movement. That's why every nomination for the Supreme Court since Bork has been a stealth nomination. (Souter simply backfired on them.)

Sure they know they are lying. But more important, they know that the truth of what the conservatives want would never be acceptable to  most of America.

This makes honest implementation impossible. But the true-believers really think that if they can implement their vision, it will work so well everyone will sit back and ask why we didn't do it earlier.

We've clearly seen how well it works in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf Coast after Katrina - Rita. But they are true believers. Instead of recognizing the failure of their ideology, they are looking for enemies who have sabotaged their efforts, so they attack their critics and redouble their efforts to do things their way.

It is more complicated than the fact that they are liars, which of course they are. It is the fact thay the have a conservative ideology that has to be pure and correct, and for which lying and destroying their enemies is a good thing.

If Bush saw the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) realeased by the CIA THEN THERE IS NO WAY HE DIDN'T KNOW THE DOUBTS ABOUT THE INTELLIGENCE.
It's right there in multiple sections in a very recognizable highlighted section called "THE INR'S ALTERNATIVE VIEW".
ttp://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB129/
Although the CIA was completely corrupted, the State Department's INR saw right through the Niger claims, the centrifuge claims, and a couple others.  They outright called the Niger claims "...highly dubious".
Either Bush can't read or he saw this info and chose to ignore it.  Is he stupid or a liar?  Why can't he be both?

dictory his speeches are. The handlers probably feed him the same Astroturf articles that they feed the press.

I think Bush has a general idea that the public needs to be manipulated, and has no problem with putting out total misinformation, not for the people or by the people but in spite of the people. Perhaps even to spite the people.

Going to war is the most important, consequence-laden decision that a president can make. If Bush allowed himself to be misled about the casus belli or otherwise failed to "do his homework," then he should resign or be impeached for whatever the constitutional equivalent of criminal incompetence is.

But I don't believe for a minute that he was misled about the existence of WMD (if that were the case, why did he not ask, at a minimum, why the UN inspectors came up with zip?) Yes, Bush is intellectually lazy and perhaps not entirely compis mentis. But as an earlier poster said, he is as cynical as they come: the only yardstick he values is the one that measures what benefits him personally. And until recently, that worked brilliantly for him.

No, the deceptions and self-deceptions had to do not with the reasons for war but in its conduct and its outcome. Cheney and Rummie probably truly believed that the invasion would be a glorious "cake walk," "slam dunk," whatever [insert favorite dopey sports metaphor here], that the boys would be home by Christmas 2003 and that Bush would coast to easy "mission accomplished" victory in Nov 2004. The newspapers and history books would fill up with hagiographies of Bush and his Adminstration, forgetting what everyone knew quite well all along: that the grounds for war were non-existant and the invasion illegal.

I don't want to be charged with "re-writing" history, but here's the way I remember what happened.  Bush didn't actively campaign for the republican nomination initially in the last months of the Clinton administration.  He had to be "recruited"  Then, after he agreed, and got the nomination, the search for vice began.  The person doing the search then found the ideal candidate- himself.  The plot Josh is refering to was hatched even before the recriting began of bush.