Can Bush Be Both Ignorant and a Liar?
Yes. There's no reason for Bush-bashers to choose between the two.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, June 23, 2003, at 2:31 PM PT


Is President Bush a liar? The New York Times' David Rosenbaum examined this
question with a surfeit of post-Howell-Raines fair-mindedness in the June 22
"Week in Review" section. His bottom line: "[A] review of the president's
public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the
president actually lied" in two particular instances. The first was when Bush
claimed he knew Saddam Hussein to possess large quantities of chemical and
biological weapons. The second was when Bush claimed that his tax cut would
provide tax relief for everyone who pays income taxes. In both instances,
Chatterbox is baffled by Rosenbaum's doubt.

Let's address Bush's tax claim first. Its falsity is not in dispute. Chatterbox
has written elsewhere that Bush lied when he said, "My jobs and growth plan
would reduce tax rates for everyone who pays income tax." (The Urban
Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center found 8.1 million people who
pay taxes but will receive no tax cuts.) Rosenbaum recognized that Bush's
statement was untrue but expressed doubt that Bush knew it to be untrue. Can a
false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a lie?

That leads us immediately to a second question, one that Rosenbaum dared not
address: Why is the speaker unaware that his statement is a lie? In Bush's
case, the answer is painfully obvious. It's because Bush is a functionally
not-bright man. As Chatterbox has explained elsewhere, it's impossible to
tell—and, ultimately, of little interest—whether Bush lacks the necessary
mental equipment, or whether he's simply incurious. The end result is the same.
Even Bush's allies concede that Bush is strikingly ignorant. In the July Vanity
Fair, Sam Tanenhaus quoted Richard Perle as saying that when he first met Bush,
it was "clear" that "he didn't know very much." Perle went on to argue (with
what he failed to recognize as condescension) that Bush is an eager pupil. But
there isn't much evidence to support even that.

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.