Is Bush a Liar or Just a Moron?
Como não tenho nada de interessante para escrever sobre a semi-reforma da função pública – ao que parece vão introduzir uns quantos estrangeirismos para as tarefas de sempre, dizer que agora o serviço de atendimento é CRM, soltar alguns fluxos de informação pelas repartições fora, criar sinergias (sem despedir ninguém!), permitir o empowerment aqui e ali; obrigar as senhoras velhotas a preparar uns briefings, antes dos seus assessments (agora externos e independentes), com base no benchmarking, para depois só serem usados se os candidatos e as candidatas pertencerem ao grupo de sueca do chefe ou da mulher do chefe, respectivamente* – vou citar mais coisas feias sobre Bush.
It's often said that Bush has the virtue of self-awareness, that he knows what he doesn't know. That's probably true. But if it is true, then Bush really oughtn't to go around making sweeping statements that he hasn't made any effort to verify. When these statements turn out to be untrue, Bush's feigned certainty alone justifies calling these statements lies. They may not be the sort of lies a clever person (say, Bill Clinton) would tell. Indeed, many left-of-center commentators (Paul Krugman and Eric Alterman come to mind) refuse to admit that Bush is dumb, presumably because they fear that would make it impossible to hold him accountable for terrible things that he and his administration do. (Many felt the same way about Reagan.) But there's no reason Bush can't be thought of as both stupid and a liar. As Slate's Michael Kinsley has noted, Bush's lies are typically lies of laziness: "If telling the truth was less bother, [he'd] try that too."
Saying that Bush lacks much on the ball does not mean that he never lies the way clever people do. Surely, for instance, Bush is aware on some level that it has yet to be proved that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons stashed away prior to the war. In addressing this question, Rosenbaum let Bush off the hook by focusing on what he said before the war began, e.g., "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Like Rosenbaum, Chatterbox is eager to cut Bush some slack on this, if only because Chatterbox, too, was convinced prior to the war that the presence of biological and chemical weapons had been proved. (Click here and here to read two columns Chatterbox now wishes he'd never written.) But Rosenbaum never considered what Bush said on Polish television after the war ended:
"We've found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations' resolutions and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on."
In fact, it has yet to be proved that the two mobile labs were used (or even designed to be used) to build biological weapons. It isn't possible that Bush fails to grasp that. So, why did he say something so obviously untrue? Chatterbox posed the question to The Nation's David Corn, who has written extensively on the question of Bush's veracity. In Corn's view, the key to Bush's lies isn't necessarily that he doesn't know any better, but that he doesn't care. "He mischaracterizes situations to fit his pattern of thinking," Corn explained. "Does he believe he's lying? I don't know." But "he still should be held accountable, whether he made a mistake of this nature in good faith or in bad faith." Amen.
* Eu avisei que não tinha nada de interessante para escrever, mas ainda assim queria aqui lamentar o meu fraco desempenho na paródia à gestão empresarial. Há uma justificação triste. Como estudante de economia fugi sempre a sete pés de todas as hipóteses que tive para conhecer melhor o mundo empresarial. Eram cadeiras (ninguém disse que não era uma hipótese remota) estranhas, muitas vezes sem matemática mas com uma dose absurda de setinhas e círculos à volta de palavras. Talvez estivesse enganado, talvez até me safasse, mas neste momento a verdade é que vocês não me quereriam na vossa empresa.
