Values and Denial

E.J. Dionne points out a quote from President Bush:

Bush gave a powerful speech in York, Pa., last week describing his “values.” He declared: “The culture of America is changing from one that has said ‘If it feels good, do it, and if you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else’ to a culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life.”

That’s a great idea. Applying it to the president means that he, not the CIA, is responsible for the case that was made for the war in Iraq. By the president’s own logic, he can’t blame a bunch of bureaucrats (“if you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else”) for his administration’s eagerness to offer the most lopsided picture possible of the threat Hussein posed.

“If it feels good, do it.” Bush is absolutely right that this is an inadequate approach to the decisions we face in life. The “values” that lead Bush to reject this concept should pertain especially to decisions to start wars and to the methods used to sell them.

Then, Richard Cohen makes some interesting points about the administration’s claims of safety… and danger:

Back in the good ol’ days of the Cold War, I returned from a visit to East Germany and was instantly berated by one of its diplomats in Washington. He wanted to know how I could have written that East Berlin was bleak and dismal when everyone knew that West Berlin was really that way. For years, I’ve wondered what happened to that man. Now I think he’s the president of the United States.

When it comes to telling you right to your face that black is white, maybe no one compares with George W. Bush. Last week, for example, he responded to yet another report that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction by saying that it didn’t matter. “Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq,” Bush said. “America is safer today because we did.”

“America is safer today because we did.” The statement is worth repeating because it ranks up there with the insistence that the sour East of Berlin out-dazzled the West. Just the day before, in fact, senior administration officials were saying that Osama bin Laden and his top guys were planning a terrorist attack in the United States sometime before the November presidential election. How’s that for safer?

… You will note that these senior administration officials did not merely say that al Qaeda was planning an attack. They specifically said bin Laden. This is the guy who Bush once vowed to get “dead or alive,” but who, lo these three years later, we have not gotten at all. He resides, or so we are told, in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and he does so because the United States failed to get him.

… But somehow, this terrorist whose capture did not matter all that much, whose apparatus would be shut down by Pentagon apparatchiks, has now caused much of Washington to break out in hives. The election may be interrupted. New York may be attacked. Still, we are safe. Check that: We are safer. In fact, we are both safe and not safe because, as the record makes clear, it is both important to get bin Laden and not important to get him — depending, of course, on which mistake some nincompoop is trying to excuse.

Meanwhile, there’s certainly joke about White House ethics inherent in this sentence from an article on White House salaries, but I’m not sure I can come up with one this early in the morning. I leave you to draw your own conclusion.

One “ethics adviser,” for example, earns $124,166 and another earns $31,277.