Bush's Mission (Accomplished) Statement continued

One of the more perspicacious utterances I have ever read concerning George W. Bush is that normative categories like correct/false, fact/fiction, honest/deceitful, and truth/lie seem to have no resonance with him. All of Bush's statements can be grouped under the umbrella category "Things I Might Say," and what he says is chosen on the basis, usually if not always, of political exigency. Under this view, Bush does not tell the truth because he values honesty as such, but because it is easier in the long run to keep his story straight if he tells the truth when he can; if he cannot tell the truth without political damage, he lies. What is very hard to think of, when it comes to Bush, is any instance when he has told a "hard truth," a truth which is personally unprofitable or injurious. Where he tells the truth, in other words, just because it's the right thing to do.

This is an extraordinary quality in a Chief Executive. It is not difficult to think of specific examples where Bush's tendencies in this direction have wasted enormous national resources while the truth is tracked down in roundabout ways necessitated completely by this aleatory approach to matters of integrity. As one such instance, the entire Valerie Plame investigation. I thought it was curious, in the summer of 2003, that Bush's first reaction to the breaking story was that "we may never know" who was responsible for the leak to Robert Novak. I have also thought it remarkable, in light of subsequent developments, that the mainstream media have never focussed on this initial reaction as they put the story together. What we now know is that it would have been difficult for Bush to throw a rock from the Oval Office without hitting someone with intimate knowledge of all of the details of the Plame matter. Specifically, it now appears that Vice President Cheney, Cheney's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, and Bush's political advisor, deputy Chief of Staff and Alter Ego Karl Rove, all were literally immersed in the scandal from the very beginning. It seems stupid, in this light, that a "special prosecutor" was necessary to get to the bottom of the Plame matter, that reporters would have been threatened with, or actually spent time in, jail for contempt, that a grand jury has listened to hundreds of hours of testimony -- all of it necessary because Bush would not do the right thing. The right thing, obviously, was to call one meeting with his senior staff and demand to know who knew what. Cheney's scribbled notes on Joe Wilson's NY Times column, Rove's e-mails, Libby's phone calls -- all of this would have popped immediately to the surface. Fitgerald, maybe, has determined that no substantive violation of the Identities Act itself has occurred, so the immediate disclosure of all of this information would presumably have resulted in NO criminal investigations or prosecutions, and no subsequent perjury, lying to federal agents or obstruction of justice indictments would have ensued. The "hard truth" revealed would have been limited to disclosures about typically over-zealous, vindictive, anti-American sniping and undermining by Bush's rabid jackals. But no crime in the technical sense.

But Bush likes the appearance of a tough, honest cowboy workin' hard to keep America safe, and admitting that all of this went on down the hall, or maybe even in the Oval Office, does not fit congruently with this false image. So he said what he said. It was unnecessary, it was misleading, it was demoralizing to the CIA and the American people, but Bush's ass was on the line (the ass of his image, anyway), and the Bush Random Statement Locator kicked in and guided his public response. Later he compounded this fatuous, misleading statement with another whopper where he said that anyone found to have leaked classified information would no longer be part of his administration. Subsequent investigation by Patrick Fitzgerald led to the inescapable conclusion that Bush's "promise," if followed literally, would have meant that most of his Administration would no longer be part of his Administration.

But he didn't mean it. He never "means" anything. He just says stuff, and if you want to believe it, go ahead. He counts on that. Almost no one believes anything he says anymore, however, and the reason is that most decent people do not follow Bush's corrupting example in matters of probity. Most people do tell hard truths for the sake of conscience, for the sake of holding the social fabric together, and for purposes of personal sanity. How much more of Bush's dissembling and toxic lying the country can take without losing its moral compass completely, however, is anyone's guess.