Andele over at Can’t Sleep at Night? makes a good point about the excuse being worse than the admission. Our Only President, he says, has the choice now of either admitting being dishonest about the intelligence or pretending he was so incompetent he believed that the Ba’athists really did pose a threat to the US. Andele suggests that we would rather have a clever but dishonest president than a incompetent honest one. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do think he’s right that the administration seems to have put its eggs in the incompetence basket.
For a different take on the question, the great Mark Schmitt writes on the Ideology of Information, and I think that he’s opening up a really good area to discuss. There is a fundamental question of how to perceive the universe, here, and it is in the long term more important to society than the question of who was a liar and who was a dupe. The question is whether it’s a good idea to take seriously the worldview of people who perceive a different universe than you do. It seems clear to me that Our Only President and his cronies have essentially taken on the idea that anyone who criticizes them or says anything that disagrees with their positions should be ignored and suppressed, because after all, that person is clearly a liberal. Liberals, being, you know, wrong about everything, and naturally appeasement-minded, objectively pro-terrorist, or whatever they believe we are, would be expected to be wrong about everything, and so of course when anybody disagrees with them, the disagreement is just one symptom of wrong-about-everything-ness. It’s a lovely tautology, and it prevents you from having to ever actually answer any criticism.
My own feeling, more or less at the time of the invasion and shortly after, was a deep resentment that Our Only President didn’t appear to care whether his advisors told him the truth or told him lies. It seemed to me that Our Only President was willing to pass along whatever they said, without the slightest interest in the veracity of the information. It wasn’t lying, quite, and it certainly wasn’t telling the truth, and it wasn’t Frankfurt-defined bullshit, either. It was, well, it was a sort of, well, it was—
Ooh! It was the President of the United States showing his contempt for his job, his constituents, the democratic process and ME PERSONALLY! Oooh!
Sorry. I do try.
Anyway, when looking at it from Andele’s point of view, which is worse: a president deliberately misleading the people (and Congress) about a putative threat in order to dupe them into a poorly-planned invasion, a president that ignored all the evidence that the threat was not serious and still believed that it was and still failed to plan properly for the invasion, or a president who didn’t care whether there was a threat and couldn’t be bothered to plan anyway?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
worse would be running the whole game in a hurry to meet electoral timetables – say what you have to say, do what you have to do, to make it happen, because both the congress and the supreme court depend on ongoing war credentials.
it was a dream, but, in this dream, i had an unknown face at a high level meeting saying: “we don’t have enough time before the mid-term elections to capture these al-qaeda people and get information from them. let’s assassinate them the weekend before. that ought to pick up a few seats. what answer can they give?”