The PoMo President

by digby

Bush is less worried about his standing with history, telling aides that George Washington’s legacy is still being debated two centuries later. But he understands that losing one chamber of Congress will cripple his lame duck-weakened final two years.

Here’s how he put it a couple of years ago:

“After the second interview with him on Dec. 11, we got up and walked over to one of the doors. There are all of these doors in the Oval Office that lead outside. And he had his hands in his pocket, and I just asked, ‘Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war,’” says Woodward.

“And he said, ‘History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, ‘History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.’”

It would, of course, be preferable for him to avoid facing a Democratic congress but even then, he probably assumes he can hold them off long enough for him to leave office — at which point the debate will be about “ending the partisanship” and that will be that. The thing that moves most powerful leaders as they see the end of their reign, their place in history, is irrelevant to this man.

His mind is so immature, and he is so extremely irresponsible, that he truly doesn’t seem to understand the ramifications of his actions. His words indicate that he sees “history” as the ultimate get out of jail free card. (“I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma.”) Perhaps he truly does believe that he’s God’s instrument who has no real will of his own and therefore no culpability — or maybe he’s just a nihilist at heart. Whatever his reasons, he seems to have adopted a shallow PoMo-style philosophy that everything is debatable down through time so it doesn’t matter what he does. Missing the point as usual, he hears the old Keynes phrase, “in the long run we’ll all be dead” and finds solace in it.

Maybe Lynn Cheney should have a chat with him about this. After all, she wrote a book on the subject:

TWQ: Tell us about what you call the attack on truth in our schools and colleges?

CHENEY: That was really the underlying topic of my last book, Telling the Truth. It’s postmodernism, the notion that there is no such thing as truth. There’s only your version of events and my version and Charles’ version and Harry’s version, and the one that prevails will be that of whoever is the most powerful. This seems to fly in the face of the way scholarship has proceeded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Uh huh.

“How can a democracy hope to choose its leaders wisely,” Lynne Cheney asked in her 1996 book [Telling The Truth], “if time and again what their campaigns offer us are artful fictions?”

The simplest way to understand Republicans is to use the quick rule of thumb that whatever they criticize Democrats for is what they are doing. Lynn Cheney and other rightwing “intellectuals” created an entire industry devoted to attacking Democrats for moral and epistemic relativism. It became an article of faith that liberals had no values and believed in nothing — an image that sticks to us like flypaper, even today. Yet nobody has practiced relativism more successfully than the modern Republican party. The Republican President of the United States believes that truth is fungible and history is debated like a highway bill on the floor of the senate — so it doesn’t really matter what he does. It’s a clever way to rationalize ignorance, incompetence and failure but it’s an extremely dangerous way for the most powerful nation on earth to conduct itself.

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