post-modern president

Just read this interesting article: The Post-Modern President: Deception, Denial, and Relativism: what the Bush administration learned from the French. Read the extended entry for some excerpts from the article.

The article also links to an amusing report measuring the "Mendacity Index", or how much and what severity of falsehood emanated from the last four presidents. Their rankings (in order of the biggest to smallest liar) are: G. W. Bush, Reagan, Bush Sr., and then Clinton. Perhaps Clinton went for the quantity over quality approach....

Excerpts from the post-modern president:

If you're a revisionist - ­someone pushing for radically changing the status quo - ­you're apt to see "the experts" not just as people who may be standing in your way, but whose minds have been corrupted by a wrongheaded ideology whose arguments can therefore be ignored. To many in the Bush administration, 'the experts' look like so many liberals wedded to a philosophy of big government, the welfare state, over-regulation and a pussyfooting role for the nation abroad.

...Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn't just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is...well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because "the facts" aren't really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don't agree with you, they're just the other side's argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that's all the facts are, it's really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.