Facts are Stupid Things

Once upon a time, while trying to say the aphorism "facts are stubborn things," Ronald Reagan mangled it into "facts are stupid things." Perhaps he was looking forward by two decades to the White House's current occupant.

Whatever else one might say about George W. Bush, he is at the very least consistent. He will not change his mind about anything. It doesn't matter if his original position is proved to be exaggerated, false or simply wrong. Once he gets an idea in his head, there is no shifting it, no way, no how. He apparently thinks that reconsidering anything under any circumstances at all is a sign of weakness.

Case in point is the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. In the pre-war propaganda campaign, Bush and his compatriots in the White House kept on saying ad nauseum that Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons, and he was working on building nuclear weapons. They said he was thick as thieves with al Qaeda, and they planted the suggestion through endless repetition that he was behind 9/11.

Of course, none of this turned out to be true. One would think that Bush and company just might feel a touch self-conscious about having put such a load of malarkey over on the American people. Unfortunately, one would be wrong. The President's know-nothing rhetoric has not changed in the slightest.

"Knowing what I know today," Bush said recently, "I would have made the same decision [to invade Iraq]." And just to make sure everyone understands, he added, ''I know what I'm doing when it comes to winning this war, and I'm not going to be sending mixed signals."

Is the leader of the free world that far removed from reality?

But since he said it, let's take a moment to assume that everything we know now really was known two years ago, when the White House started the war drums a-beating. Let's assume that Bush was fully aware that Hussein did not possess WMD stockpiles, that a few extremely rudimentary development programs were in total chaos, that he was not about to give al Qaeda the time of day because the two sides hated each other's guts, and that he had nothing to do with 9/11 -- in short, that he was not even remotely a threat. (By a staggering coincidence, this is exactly what large numbers of CIA, State Department and Pentagon analysts said before the invasion, but they were studiously ignored. After all, when the ideological decision to invade has already been made, any inconvenient facts which counter that decision must be discarded.)

Would he really still have decided to disrupt his own War on Terror by attacking the wrong target, bogging American troops down in a desert quagmire, turning friends into enemies, blowing away all our post-9/11 goodwill, and giving al Qaeda a gold-plated recruiting poster?

Bush's don't-bother-me-with-the-facts answer is highly disturbing and should signal the death of his re-election efforts. It reveals the most powerful man in the world as utterly unable to consider any possible alternate course of action, for any reason, once the initial decision has been made. He genuinely believes that changing his mind for any reason at all is "sending mixed signals." Sticking with a decision no matter what, on the other hand, shows shows strength and resolve. That would be true -- if the decision were a good one.

But if all the available evidence says that the decision was a bad one, that's not strength, that's blind arrogance. After all, if you're digging a hole and the water is pouring in, the first rule is to stop digging and find a way to climb out.

Bush's response to criticisms over the war has been to point out that Senator John Kerry voted for the resolution giving Bush the power to go to war, therefore he must have agreed with it. Kerry's painful attempts to respond aside, he did indeed vote yes, in large part based on false information, but once the truth was revealed, he changed his mind and refused to continue supporting Bush's war. Hence his vote against pouring an additional $87 billion into the Iraq occupation. Bush sneeringly calls this "flip-flopping."

I don't know about you, but when I get a choice between someone who is capable of recognizing and reconsidering a bad decision and someone who sees it as a sign of weakness, I'll pick the first guy. And I'll do it every time.