Bush: Full of shit again

In today's Washington Post, Harold Meyerson gets to the heart of why the Bush administration is fundamentally unfit to govern. Meyerson's column titled The Professionals' Revolt puts the current controversy over Richard Clarke's new book into the context of the several bureaucrats and officers of Bush's government who have grown frustrated with the administration's cavalier attitude toward the truth.

Step back a minute and look at who has left this administration or blown the whistle on it, and why. Clarke enumerates a half-dozen counterterrorism staffers, three of whom were with him in the Situation Room on Sept. 11, who left because they felt the White House was placing too much emphasis on the enemy who didn't attack us, Iraq, and far too little on the enemy who did.

But that only begins the list. There's Paul O'Neill, whose recent memoir recounts his ongoing and unavailing battle to get the president to take the skyrocketing deficit seriously. There's Christie Todd Whitman, who appears in O'Neill's memoir recalling her own unsuccessful struggles to get the White House to acknowledge the scientific data on environmental problems. There's Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, who told Congress that it would take hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to adequately secure postwar Iraq. There's Richard Foster, the Medicare accountant, who was forbidden by his superiors from giving Congress an accurate assessment of the cost of the administration's new program. All but Foster are now gone, and Foster's sole insurance policy is that Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress were burnt by his muzzling.

In the Bush administration, you're an empiricist at your own peril. Plainly, this has placed any number of conscientious civil servants -- from Foster, who totaled the costs on Medicare, to Clarke, who charted the al Qaeda leads before Sept. 11 -- at risk. In a White House where ideology trumps information time and again, you run the numbers at your own risk. Nothing so attests to the fundamental radicalism of this administration as the disaffection of professionals such as Foster and Clarke, each of whom had served presidents of both parties.

This willful indifference to facts is the defining characteristic of the Bush presidency. Unsurprisingly the main of Bush's defense against Clarke's charges has not consisted of factual refutation so much as it has personal attacks against Clarke. I will not even attempt to express my distaste for this kind of dishonesty and its reflection on the society which permits it. At least, I won't when none other than Mark Twain has already done so for me (see below.) There is a bit of political conventional wisdom which holds that if you can pin a lie on your opponent and make it stick, then you've got him beaten. Bush has certainly provided enough fodder. Let's hope some of it still has weight come November.