Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Glad you got to those notes after about seven years

Richard Cohen, hasn't he written about a dozen articles tut-tutting us deranged-foaming bloggers for saying pretty much this same thing?

Ponder that answer for a while. What it means is not just that Bush embraced a famously irrational way of thinking -- the logical fallacy often called "proving a negative" -- but in this case he used it to overwhelm all evidence to the contrary. Once you know this, you can appreciate what Bush means when he calls himself The Decider. It means that evidence, arguments, proof and logic cannot be conclusive when, as is often the case, the president proceeds on what can be called a matter of faith. I am not referring here just to religion -- although surely that is paramount to Bush -- but to supremely secular matters of state: when to go to war, why go to war and when to remain at war. In Bush's mind, the bad guys will lose and the good guys will win and Iraq will become a democracy. This will happen not because Bush can prove that it will but because nobody can prove it won't.

This is why we are in Iraq today and why we are going to stay there. All this time, it did not matter that Iraq was going to hell, or that the terrorists were never there in the first place, or that weapons of mass destruction were never present, or that Saddam Hussein had no role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, or that democracy for Iraq was never really in the cards -- none of that mattered, because nobody could prove otherwise. All the things Bush believed were true because you, rational fool that you are, could not prove them false.


Aside from the sigh that comes around when what has been plainly obvious for years starts to stated amongst "polite society", one has to ask Bush a simple question.

How many people have to die against all evidence because of Bush's illogical belief system?

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