With Bush, facts just don’t matter
By Jonathan Chait
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As somebody who doesn't have the slightest feeling one way or another about baseball star Rafael Palmeiro, I have to say it seems pretty clear Palmeiro has used steroids. Palmeiro recently tested positive for steroid use. And then there's former teammate Jose Canseco's allegation that he and Palmeiro used steroids, which is impossible to verify but would seem to explain why Palmeiro's annual home run total nearly doubled after Canseco joined him on the Texas Rangers. None of this is ironclad proof, but it seems the simplest way to reconcile the available data.
President Bush, though, doesn't 'see it this
way at all. When asked about Palmeiro's positive steroid test, Bush, who knew
Palmeiro when the president owned the Rangers - replied: "Rafael Palmeiro is a friend. He testified in public
and I believe him. He's the kind of person that's going to stand up in front of
the klieg lights and say he didn't use steroids, and I believe him."
This statement perfectly crystallizes Bush's
thinking. Facts don't matter to him. What matters is how he feels about the
person in question. Iri 2001, for instance, Bush met with Russian President
Vladimir Putin, and the two hit it off. As Bush later told Peggy Noonan, Putin
recounted to him a story involving a cross given to him by his mother.
"I said to him: 'You know, I found that
story very interesting. You see, President Putin, I think you judge a person
on something other than just politics. I think it's important for me and for
you to look for the depth of a person's soul and character. I was touched by
the fact your mother gave you the cross.' " Bush publicly testified of
Putin, "I was able to get a sense of his soul."
Personally, I put less weight on the fact
that Putin got a cross from his mother, and more on the fact that Putin has
smothered Russian democracy by outlawing opposition parties, shutting down any
remotely skeptical media outlet and subjecting his critics to political show
trials. Yet this sort of evidence has had barely any effect on Bush. Two years
later, he was still praising Putin's desire for "a country in which
democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive."
Bush is even apt to apply this particular
brand of illogic to his own character. In one of the 2000 presidential debates,
Al Gore pointed out that Bush as governor of Texas opposed a measure to expand
children's health care and instead used the money for a tax cut. The debate
moderator then asked Bush, "Are those numbers correct? Are his charges correct?"
To which Bush replied, "If he's trying to allege that I'm a hardhearted
person and I don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong."
The style of Bush's reply is telling. Gore
was trying to make a point about Bush's moral priorities by establishing a
series of facts about Bush's behavior.
Rather than deny having chosen tax cuts over children's health care, or
explain his rationale for having done so, Bush changed the subject to more comfortable
ground: judging people's hearts.
.
He asked the audience to intuit, based on the
way he carries himself, that he is a warmhearted person, and thus to reject
out of hand any facts that might clash with this impression.
The point isn't just that Bush refuses to
engage with facts he finds inconvenient. (Many fail that test.) It's that Bush
rejects reason itself. Reason is a process by which we draw our broader
conclusions from an accumulation of specific evidence. When the evidence
changes ("Hey, this Putin guy seems to be squelching dissent"), our
conclusions can also ("Perhaps he doesn't love democracy as much as he
said he did!").
Bush, on the other hand, arrives at his
beliefs through intuition. His supporters marvel at the unshakable certainty of
his convictions. Well, no wonder.
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at the New Republic. He wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times. Reprinted from San Jose Mercury-News, August 10, 2005.
