Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Is Bush a Liar?

(Reprinted from the issue of October 27, 2005)

The fight over Harriet Miers has gone from very bad to even worse. I could only pity the poor woman as she went the rounds on Capitol Hill, offering her friendly smile to men like New York’s Charles Schumer like a wee mouse trying to ingratiate itself with big hungry cats. Why is her friend George W. Bush putting her through this?

Still, Bush insisted she’d be a worthy addition to the U.S. Supreme Court, though everyone knew better; just as he insists his Iraq war is going well, though everyone knows better. The wonder is that he never seems even slightly abashed to contradict the evidence of our senses.

Whereas Bill Clinton spoke humbug with poise and polish, even when lying through his teeth, Bush seems not to realize he’s speaking humbug. Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosopher, has written a tiny book with a deliberately vulgar title on the difference between the outright conscious falsehood and the more common vice of saying things that blur the line between truth and falsity, usually with no particular intention to deceive.

Bush isn’t exactly lying to us when he says that Miss Miers is devoted to the Constitution, or that the war is going well, or that his new Medicare benefits are affordable; he wants to believe these things are true, and it may be impossible to prove them wrong, even if they offend common sense.

This is how politicians talk, and as one sharp observer remarked to me the other day, everything Bush says has the ring of an applause line. If it sounds good to him, he expects it to be believed, or at least accepted as something we should want to believe — and something we should give him credit for wanting to believe himself.

The late Michael Kelly, the most noted journalist to die in Iraq, used to write about Clinton’s “serial sincerity.” A nice phrase, but it may be more applicable to Bush than to Clinton, who really lied. Bush is more earnest. Clinton thought we were all suckers; he wasn’t taken in by his own mendacity. But Bush really wants to believe what he says; if it’s not true, he’s his own chief gull.

As Frankfurt says, the liar may need a keener grasp of the truth than the man who spouts humbug. He cites St. Augustine’s insight that whereas most of us lie under pressure, some men take real pleasure in deceiving others for its own sake; lying can give you a kind of power over those you fool.

Another way to put it is that sincerity requires a mental effort; it may not be automatic. You have to grasp reality and listen to yourself critically. Bush doesn’t seem to ask himself whether his words accurately describe the facts. This makes him so exasperating to listen to that some people, overcome by irritation, accuse him of lying when he may be doing something else. He is probably neither sincere nor mendacious. When he speaks, we are hearing his wishful thinking.

Lying is a kind of betrayal. The speaker is breaking faith with people who trust him, and he knows what he is doing. But the humbug is emitting empty sounds he thinks will pass, often because they are too generalized to be nailed as specific deceits. This is why humbug is so often about freedom, democracy, patriotism, and other edifying topics that, however vacuous, appeal to our reverence. If you reject them you may be accused of cynicism and disloyalty. Both the speaker of humbug and the auditor, by seeming to agree, are taking the path of least resistance, joined by a bond of insincerity.
 
Harriet Miers’s Dark Secret

Miss Miers’s hopes for confirmation suffered a setback when it transpired that she had once signed a petition calling for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. The news media reported this as a scandal, worse than if she had had an abortion herself.

On the one hand, it was good to know that she regards (or at least used to regard) abortion as evil. And like any citizen, she had a perfect right to advocate an amendment to the Constitution. Why should her exercise of that right disqualify her for any public office?

If a Supreme Court justice thinks, say, that the First Amendment should be repealed, he might still apply the First Amendment to specific cases as long as it remained in effect.

On the other hand, this revelation showed how little she understands the Constitution, if she thinks Roe v. Wade can only be corrected by an amendment, when in fact it was an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the Court.

Not that Bush himself seems very clear on all this. And after all, his own constitutional transgressions over the past five years have been made under the guidance of Miss Miers, in her capacities as his personal attorney and White House counsel.

Her embarrassing adulation of her boss, as revealed in her memos to him, did nothing to help her case. Liberals reacted to these memos with understandable glee, for they exposed not only the sycophancy prevalent in this administration, but its shockingly low intellectual level.

This whole pathetic mess has destroyed the Bush White House’s reputation for possessing at least a certain political cunning. It badly overestimated conservative loyalty and learned the hard way that even Rush Limbaugh and the neoconservatives of National Review will draw the line somewhere.
 
Clooney’s Folly

George Clooney is my favorite Hollywood star today, a romantic comedian who bears comparison with Cary Grant and can also carry a movie in heroic roles. What’s more, he’s a thoughtful, intelligent man whom I usually find impressive in interviews even when I disagree with him.

So it pains me to read about his new film, Good Night and Good Luck, a celebration of Edward R. Murrow, that overblown icon of broadcast journalism. I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s Clooney’s brainchild: he conceived, produced, and directed it, and also plays one of the chief characters.

It tells how the evil witch-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy kept an entire nation in abject terror until one dauntless man — Murrow, of course — summoned the courage to stand up to him alone.

This is one of liberalism’s most cherished myths. Sheer nonsense, of course, a bizarre exaggeration of both McCarthy’s power and Murrow’s bravery. I hope Clooney’s project will be the last retelling of this silly fable, and he’ll find other projects worthy of his great talent.


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Joseph Sobran