Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, poses the burning question of our times:
The Bush administration -- cunning liars or deluded fools?
Kristof argues for the latter, citing unspecified "evidence" that suggests the Shrub and his top aides were themselves fooled into believing the occupation of Iraq would be some kind of liberation cake walk:
The administration chose to rely not on intelligence but on wishful thinking, and it became intoxicated by the siren calls of Ahmad Chalabi, a silver-tongued charlatan.
Now the idea that Shrub and his minions may have deluded themselves into believing the conquest of Iraq would be short and sweet is not, on its face, completely absurd --- although the picture of Ahmad Chalabi as a "silver-tongued siren" probably is.
After all, these folks already live in an alternate reality, one in which Vietnam was a noble cause, the world loves and wants to be just like America, the state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophesy, and the terrorists hate us simply because we are "free."
People who believe things like that can make themselves believe almost anything -- and probably will.
But Kristof's case, such as it is, breaks down almost immediately when he brings up the administration's postwar propaganda campaign:
Mr. Cheney has cited a Zogby International poll to back his claim that there is "very positive news" in Iraq. But the pollster, John Zogby, told me, "I was floored to see the spin that was put on it; some of the numbers were not my numbers at all."Mr. Cheney claimed that Iraqis chose the U.S. as their model for democracy "hands down," and he and other officials say that a majority want American troops to stay at least another year. In fact, Mr. Zogby said, only 23 percent favor the U.S. democratic model, and 65 percent want the U.S. to leave in a year or less.
"I am not willing to say they lied," Mr. Zogby said. "But they used a very tight process of selective screening, and when they didn't get what they wanted they were willing to manufacture some results. . . . There was almost nothing in that poll to give them comfort."
Mr. Zogby may not be willing to say it, but I am. Cheney lied. So did Wolfowitz, who's been using, and abusing, the same poll results. Bush lied (a particularly obvious whopper) about who dreamed up the "Mission Accomplished" banner -- which itself was a lie. Jerry Bremer lies practically every time he opens his mouth.
And when they can't lie their way out of a jam, they send their minions to "correct" the electronic record, and to make sure the originals are safely flushed down the memory hole.
Now you could make the fairly extreme argument that the Bushies have gone completely psychotic, and are simply doing whatever it takes to defend their fantasy world against the unwelcome instrusion of reality -- just as Mark Chapman had to shoot John Lennon in order to protect his fantasy of being John Lennon. But even I'm not willing to go that far.
Neither is Kristof. Instead he indulges in bit of pop sociology, suggesting that Bush is a victim of his own incurable optimism -- an optimism fed by his formative years in the Texas outback:
Brash optimism perhaps has its roots in Mr. Bush's hometown, Midland, Tex., an oil town that regularly rewarded hard work with a gusher, a place where everybody you meet displays this same hearty can-do confidence. In Midland, Mr. Bush unfortunately absorbed the lesson that risks in the desert pay off.
But this is -- to say the least -- a rather gross misrepresentation of Shrub's misspent youth. Grandson of a Senator, son of a Congressman/UN Ambassador/CIA Director/Vice President/President, little Bush never had the chance to learn about "risks in the desert," because nothing he did before the age of 45 involved taking risks.
I mean, what kind of lessons has Bush's career actually taught him?
- That if your Dad is a wealthy and successful Yalie, you, too, can get into Yale.
- That if your Dad is a big cheese in the Republican Party, you can get into the Harvard Business School.
- That if you're afraid you're going to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, Dad's friends can always find you a slot in the National Guard. And if you want to go AWOL and work on a political campaign in Alabama, they'll can make that happen, too.
- That if you start an oil company and it goes bust, your Dad's friends will make sure another company buys your stake and gives you a seat on its board.
- That if you want to sell your shares in your new company because it looks like it might be in trouble, the Harvard Endowment will be happy to buy them from you.
- That if your insider trading gets into trouble with the SEC, one of Dad's employees can make your problem disappear.
- That if you want to be president and part owner of a baseball team, some of Dad's friends will be happy to oblige -- with only a minimal down payment on your part.
- That if you decide you want to be governor, Dad's friends will make sure you have all the money you need.
- That if you run for president and lose, Dad's friends -- and your loving brother, the governor of Florida -- will make sure you don't really lose.
Hell, if I'd learned those lessons in my life, I'd probably be a wild-eyed optimist, too!
Billmon, your treatment of the sources of G W Bush's optimism is excellent. I've never understood why he appeals to my redneck uncles and cousins when he is, in fact, an overgrown, spoiled rich kid from Connecticut.
But the fact that Kristof has cast the major question about the administration in this way is important. Either way, the administration needs to go.
Even if I thought the invasion of Iraq was a great idea instead of a harmful distraction from fighting Al Qaeda, I'd be mad as hell at the blinkered and ideological approach taken by this administration that has pushed anything resembling success out of reach.
And now that it is clear that our invasion was motivated not so much by the threat of WMD or a link to 9/11, but by the humanitarian impulse to free a subject people from an evil despot, I'd like to know why are aren't invading Burma right this minute. There, the democratically elected leader is again under house arrest while the Generals grow rich on deals with drug trafficking militias and the Burmese Army uses rape as tactic of war against ethnic minorities.
Bravo Billmon, I salute you telling of the truth.
However, these days:
I do not envy the leaders of today, especially in North America.
The hypocrisy level is a truthful lie/lieful truth.
If a diagram was used of an xy axis,
of deception versus time in todays civilizations:
D |
E |......................x
C |......................
E |.....................
P |...................
T |................
I |.........
O |..
N |____________________
TIME
at this time (i.e.2003), the exponential curve would come out of the plane into the z-axis and a new paradigm is created.
This is what is happening now, except we do not live in a two dimensional plane.
It is a albeit a poor model but the only one I have to describe the current level of hypocrisy.
Oh, these guys are Cunning Liars all right, but only in the Sacred Name of a Higher Straussian Truth.
Which, of course, makes them Deluded Fools.
well, unless you count getting behind the wheel after a few too many....oh wait, daddy would be there to bail him out-- right??
I just turned off italics. Now I am checing to see if it worked.
hmmmm
Billmon, I agree with everything in your post, but I also agree with Kristof's delusion theory...
Why can't it be both?
On particular points in such a complicated issue, I would guess that: some are lies, some are delusion, some are a desperate mixture of the two.
the burning question of our times: The Bush administration -- cunning liars or deluded fools?
I've been saying it for months-- the correct answer is "deluded, foolish liars."
Why can't it be both?
I think it can be both in lots of different ways. My favoured conspiracy theory has cunning liars with a deluded fool as a frontman. Worse comes to the worst the cunning liars can change the deluded fool.
Isn't that really the worst case?
My favoured conspiracy theory has cunning liars with a deluded fool as a frontman.
Bingo!
How about this: the Bush Pirates are deluded cunning liars. They delude themselves about the truth, then lie about it to get people to agree with them.
italics?
marvelous.
indeed kristof even when one of his columns starts out critical of Bush somehow almost always - and always in violation of logic and reality - manages to impart some benign spin. (He has even previously so employed a fantasy version of Bush's upbringing, conveniently forgetting B's eastern prep school years. Really, Kristof should read a biography. And give Occam's razor a try. Simplest explanation, best explanation.
What's with all the italics? Are we all supposed to be whispering?
How about: "the Bush Administration--cunning fools lying to the deluded." Or maybe: "the Bush Administration--foolish liars deluding the cunning." Or it could be: "the Bush Administration--lying dudes conning the fooled." Or perhaps: "the Bush Administration--drooling cunts flying on ludes." Or ... oh the hell with it.
Cunning liars or deluded fools.
Uhm..decisions, decisions.....
Just like Frank Stockton's "Lady or the Tiger"
A man who tells a lie that will be inevitably revealed in a few hours has a problem. When that man is the president, we all have a problem.
These guys are deluded. They live in a fantasy world, self-reinforcing, just as Billmon points out. Every misstep is rewarded with more money and privilege. Dubya was apparently a horrible businessman, yet he continued to fail upward, until he found himself in a business (Major League Baseball, decidedly non free market, by the way) where his family connections, his personal skill, and the legal corruption of professional sports, enabled him to be a "success" -- and get rich at the same time. Cheney, to all accounts, was a disaster for Haliburton. Yet he got gigantic bonuses.
As for lying, it is just one of the tools (they'd call it Corporate Communications) that they use in their public/business affairs.
Much was made at the outset of Bush II about the advent of the MBA administration -- no sneaky, lying lawyers here. Instead, we were getting a trained business manager.
Well, and please forgive me all you MBAs out there, but what's so special about that. We all work for these kinds of people. You know, the people who combine the manager gene with the ambition gene. Do their MBAs, their toadying ambition, their constant spinning make them wise or even likeable people?
American Corporate Culture (which completely pervades our larger national culture) has reached its zenith in the ascendancy of these guys. Its ruling principle is the pursuit of self interest. The emptiness of these people is being exposed bit by bit. Their lying and delusion cannot be sustained for much longer.
Perhaps Kristoff and Billmon are both wrong. I think what we may be seeing here is neither lying nor delusion. Instead, it is the self-propelling fallacy. Here's how it works:
First, remember that a Bush family trait is valuing loyalty above all else. For the Shrub, the perception of loyalty lies in not contradicting or otherwise throwing cold water on anything Shrub wants to do (i.e., being "supportive").
Now, Shrub gets it in his head that he's going to finish what his daddy started. And the self-propelling fallacy is set in motion. Those who bring him news and information that aid and abet his wish are loyal; those who don't are not (Gen. Shinseki, for example). And so the feedback loop begins.
That invading Iraq just happens to coincide with the PNAC vision is mere coincidence. All it does is make the loop stronger.
Meanwhile, Bush is fed a constant stream of incorrect and misleading information. He processes that (as much as he's able to) and regurgitates it to the public. Even though every word he utters is not true, neither is it a lie. It is a product of the self-propelling fallacy.
Macaulay,
That really is a funny observation. I have worked for buisiness types where it is absolutely increadible that they successfully tie their shoes in the morning. To say that they are blatantly incompetant would be an insult to all of the good honest hard working blatantly incompetant people out there. And yet these people, once they reach a certain level in the company, seem to be able to spin away every disaster and missed deadline. Absolutely nothing sticks to them even as the world collapses around them and it is their fault.
It truly is a gift and our current administration has it in spades. These guys really are trying to run the Iraqi adventure like one of their companies. Problem is they are from the teflon-idiot school of buisiness management and in Iraq they won't be able to spin away the coming disaster. The Iraqi resistance is not buying it. The American public probably will though. Lucky us.
some thoughts from our leader, mind you the richest, most powerful nation in the world....scary!...
"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."
"I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children."
"In my sentences I go where no man has gone before. "
"The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case. "
"There's not going to be enough people in the system to take advantage of people like me."
"They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it's some kind of federal program."
"One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures."
"A lame duck session, for people who don't know what that means, it means the Senate is coming and the House is coming back between now and Christmas and they've got a few days to get some big things done."
"It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it."
"The administration I'll bring is a group of men and women who are focused on what's best for America, honest men and women, decent men and women, women who will see service to our country as a great privilege and who will not stain the house."
"I stand by all the mis-statements that I've made."
These guys really are trying to run the Iraqi adventure like one of their companies.
Yeah, and guess who is going to be Daddy's friend who comes to bail out GWB this time around? You guessed it, you and me.
Let's see if this ends the italics.
i don't like him, he stole my nickname.
at the Wharton school, they teach that a system has behaviours that could not be predicted from just considering the parts. The parts here are craftyness, lying, delusion, foolishness, and a real problem in being either precise or accurate. The System is what we now perceive.
They just did not have any examples this clear in class.
What a take down Billion - you nail it so well.
Kristof acts like a Democrat Senator-no spine, and no sense of the meaning of his own words.
Perhaps Kristof thinks if he says something nice about Bush and Cheney (it wasn't a lie just a misunderstanding see) than conservatives will read his column and agree with him-or he won't get some much hate email, I'm not sure.
But its a lossing campaign because it's like you said "Kristof's case, such as it is, breaks down almost immediately", thus becoming a campaign in contradictions.
If one believes that most people are rational and reasonable individuals then one needs only to present evidence to such an individual and NOT per se to a conservative or liberal mindset. Kristof simply needs to give the facts of the issues about how it REALLY is impossible that Cheney or Bush didn’t realize the case they were present to American public was not in fact exceedingly fraudulent information.
Kristof, like a lot of Americans are suffering from the fact that they just cannot accept that both Bush and Cheney are criminal as they both appear to be. Sort of a groupthink problem on a national level, I guess. Both Cheney and Bush and most of their cabinet members are white collar ciminials and have been practicing conspiracy to commit fraud with the intent of do so.
I don't know how many body bags or economy loss the average US citizen will accept before realizing something stinks horribly in Washington DC, but it seems like to much already to me.
And the incomprehesively horrible thing is that these immoral, ignorant liars are not only loosing other peoples' money and jobs, this time they are also getting lots and lots of people killed; throwing away lives with as little thought as going through a roll of toilet paper. The "Evil Doers" were here before the first plane hit the WTC.
CLOSE YOUR ITALIC TAG AUGH :)
Bush is smart enough to know he's in over his head. He's known since childhood that he has problems, and that he hasn't measured up in the "smarts" deparment. He knows he's a bad reader, that he failed at business, that he's been bailed out and boosted up in every test he's tried, including politics.
He knows that he relies on others around the President to tell him what to think and say.
Bush's struggle is to try to feel good about himself despite all this, and that's one chink through which delusion can seep into this presidency.
"I'm an executive-style leader, I truly prefer to delegate, even my reading assignments, even my thinking assignments" "The baseball money wasn't a gimme, it was my "people skills." "I'm winning, in my own way." "Rules are for losers."
He "knows" these aren't true, but he tries to believe.
And so on.
Bush has discovered that a "win" makes him feel good, even if it involves rule bending. He knows the rules were bent, but he needs the win to feel OK.
Here: I'll close it for you: </i>
There. Isn't that better?
Ugh, "incomprehensibly." Sorry.
Last year, my father-in-law was telling me how he heard on NPR (? probably) a reporter or someone who was analyzing all of Bush's speachs and found that Shrub can talked clearly and relatively eloquently about taking action and declaring right and wrong, but when it came to issues that involve nuance and feelings and admitting weakness, he gets totally tongue tied. The prime example was his "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...won't get fooled again" line. He couldn't admit weekness, he couldn't say "shame on me." The person looking at his words came to the conclusion that our Prez has a deep and dangerous psychological problem, he cannot admit weakness, no matter how small. Which, of course, is no surprise to people on this comment board.
There's another way of saying this: much evil in this world can be explained by stupidity, not by intent.
Last year, my father-in-law was telling me how he heard on NPR (? probably) a reporter or someone who was analyzing all of Bush's speachs and found that Shrub can talked clearly and relatively eloquently about taking action and declaring right and wrong, but when it came to issues that involve nuance and feelings and admitting weakness, he gets totally tongue tied.
That was probably Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon.
Bush is smart enough to know he's in over his head.
I don't think so. He's not the least bit introspective, he has no curiosity about anything, and he has no empathy for any other human being (which is why -- as Mark Crispin Miller points out -- he gets tongue-tied when he tries to fake compassion, but can speak quite clearly when he's talking about killing people).
There's also that "God chose me to lead" thing, and would the Big Guy let his faithful servant get in over his head? Bush thinketh not.
Slightly OT, but I liked the kicker to Maureen Dowd's latest column:
Perhaps the solution to Mr. Bush's quandary is to coordinate his schedule so he can go to cities where he can attend both fund-raisers and funerals.
The law of averages suggests it shouldn't be hard.
I wonder if Bush is a clinical psychopath. He has many of the symptoms, including an engaging confidence and an ability to skate by on charm.
- Gahh! that unclosed Itallics block is hard to look at.
I think your Mark Chapman analogy hits the mark. I'd go a step further and compare Bush supporters to the sad Mary Jo Buttafuoco when she decided it was best to believe her husband's version of the events concerning the Long Island Lolita and the bullet in her head. Had she chosen to believe Amy Fisher's (probably true) contention that Joey Buttafuoco was in on the fun, her life as it had existed up to that point was over. How much easier to believe a lie if it creates a veneer of normalcy where there would otherwise be a frightening existential void?
sidereal: charm? who the fuck is charmed by this syntactically/semantically challenged, agressively stupid, fundamentalist bozo? I myself can only take a few seconds of his transparent lies before lunging for the channel changer.
I'd love to know who daddy hired to do his work at Harvard and Yale.
Bush's symptoms are more those of a sociopath than a psychopath. As Iraqis are fond of saying, Bush and Saddam are two faces of the same coin.
PS I find quite apt the description of Bush as exemplifying dry drunk syndrome.
Any other old farts recall that SNL skit with the lovely and greatly-missed Madeline Kahn as Pat Nixon writing in her diary, Dan Ackroyd as Nixon and Chevy Chase as David Eisenhower?
Eisenhower (in uniform -- anybody remember what service and rank?): "The other men say you're half-crazy, sir, but I like to think of you as 'half-sane'."
Nixon (sarcastically): "Well, thanks a lot."
Heh.
As for President Little Boots, I believe we're looking at an habitual liar who's just cunning enough to realize the best way to lie convincingly is at second hand. That is, surround yourself with people who only tell you what you want to hear, and repeat what they tell you.
Bush is the classic example of someone whose self-confidence is in inverse proportion to his actual competence. This is an inherently fragile structure, even more so when it's coupled with a belief system that -- if the reports are true -- includes the conviction that he was channeling the will of God when he invaded Iraq.
If he truly believed what he said, the utter failure of this gamble might just be the final straw.
So it really comes down to is which is the scarier scenario: A cunning liar who pulled off the whole Iraq scam as a way to enrich his cronies, or the delusional liar who's got his finger on the button?
Didn't the Pentagon take control of the nukes away from Nixon, in the last weeks before he resigned? Of course, I'd find that reflection much more comforting if I'd never heard of General Boykin....
We having a saying down in crawford... uhh.. er.. fool me once.. umm.. ughhn.. shame.. shame on you.. erhm.. fool me twice.. uhh.. cant get fooled again!
;)