Raw Story - Heart of darkness (Plame/Rove/Bush)

[Starfury]

This Raw Story editorial posits that Bush may really be telling the truth when he says that he knows Karl Rove is innocent of wrong doing. I'm still not sure what to think about this article. On the one hand, it does seem to fit Bush's observed behavior, how he operates without basis in reality. But on the other hand, Bush may just be a lousy con man. Of course, the two possiblities aren't mutually exclusive... :)

That, I submit, is not what George Bush means when he says he knows something. He knew Karl Rove was innocent in the same way he knew that there were WMDs in Iraq, and that Osama got birthday cards from Saddam. More to the point, he knew it the way he knew God wanted him to be president.

(...)

The strength, and the weakness, of such a closed, tautological system is that it is entirely immune to refutation by fact or logic. It is a strength, at least in the short term, because a black and white world view is seductive, and when packaged with blanket statements that also obviate the need for accepting responsibility, they are virtual opiates. Hoi polloi are comforted when medicated by pseudo-intellectuals with such circular, hand-washing nonsense as “The terrorists hate us for who we are, not what we do” and “The killers are killers because they want to kill, not because the coalition invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan, or because there are bases in Saudi Arabia, or because Israel will not retreat to the 1967 borders.” But with time, such insularity becomes weakness. As time and events inevitably increase the distance between rigid belief and reality, the necessary suspension of disbelief becomes ever more difficult. Galileo’s work outlived the Inquisition; Reagan traded arms for hostages although “in his heart” he thought otherwise; Iraq spirals further into Hell despite the spin of a hundred Panglosses. History unfolds heedless of the illusions of its spectators and even, to a large extent, of its participants.

So our President knows Karl Rove is innocent of any wrongdoing, no matter what facts may bubble up from the tar pit he nurtured but cannot acknowledge. Because Bush cannot recognize the incompatibility between his knowledge and the facts that refute it, he cannot resolve that contradiction. Thus it falls to Patrick Fitzgerald to resolve it for him.

As the Plamegate case goes forward, and the evidence against Rove in the real world mounts, it is likely that Bush will, to his ruin, continue to cling to his belief even as the tsunami of contrary facts engulfs him. If we are lucky, those who are so blind that shall not see will decide that following Bush lemming-like into that abyss might not be such a good idea after all. And maybe, just maybe, after the deluge we will finally have a meaningful confrontation between the "reality-based community" in which facts matter and actions have consequences, and the fairy-tale world where Neocons and fundamentalists know things because, well, just because.

http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/steinberg/heart_of_darkness_072905.htm