It’s always seemed as if President Bush had a bizarrely inhuman ability to latch onto a single idea or phrase or message and stick to it regardless of changes in circumstantial reality that discredited the idea. We saw this in action with his tax cuts, which, as Paul Krugman bore witness, began life as a way of disposing of the federal budget surplus and then got repurposed into an antidote to the recession after the economy went south. One policy — fits all events!
Now Will Saletan of Slate has prepared a remarkable chronological record of presidential quotations that demonstrates this phenomenon at its most damningly, painfully extreme. We’ve all heard, one time or another, Bush’s boilerplate rhetoric about “Saddam’s torture chambers and rape rooms.” As the other rationales for the Iraq war evaporated, this one, at least, seemed rock-solid: the U.S. invasion had shut down those torture chambers and rape rooms. This sounded great, until we learned to our horror and disgrace that in fact those enterprises had simply undergone a change of ownership.
Go read Saletan’s quotes, in which Bush and his men keep parroting the line about torture chambers even as the scandal of American-sponsored torture in Saddam’s notorious old prison was grabbing headlines worldwide. No matter — the old message just kept on trucking.
On April 30 — two days after CBS had broadcast its photos of Abu Ghraib — Bush, like some malfunctioning android, was still saying: “And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq.” Again, on May 3, he says essentially the same thing. The images that have much of the globe reeling were apparently unable to dislodge this message-of-the-day formulation from the president’s cranium.
In a struggle against a global enemy that demands the utmost of nimble flexibility on our part, we are cursed: our leader has a brain of clay. Once the mold is baked, the mind is set, there’s no give.
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