Bush’s appearance on Meet the Press has been summarized, analyzed, and scrutinized by just about everyone by now, so I’m afraid I don’t have anything unique to add.
As a matter of substance, I’d strongly recommend you read two reports. First, the Center for American Progress prepared a “claim vs. fact” sheet, comparing what Bush said to the truth. After reading the CAP report and the transcript, you begin to realize that almost every word out of the president’s mouth was either a lie or a mistake.
Second, Slate’s William Saletan had the best review of the interview that I’ve seen anywhere. Saletan compares Bush’s approach to honesty with Plato’s approach to reality. This may sound a bit turgid, but believe me, it’s brilliant and well-worth reading.
This big-picture notion of reality, existence, and the world as it is dates back 2,400 years to the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato believed that what’s real isn’t the things you can touch and see: your computer, your desk, those empty barrels in Iraq that Bush thought were full of chemical weapons. What’s real is the general idea of these things. The idea of a computer. The idea of a desk. The idea of an Iraqi threat to the United States. Whether you actually have a computer or a desk, or whether Saddam Hussein actually had chemical weapons, is less important than the larger truth. The abstraction is the reality.
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In Bush’s Platonic reality, the world is dangerous, threats exist, and the evidence of our senses must be interpreted to fit that larger truth. On the night he launched the war, for example, Bush told the nation, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Russert asked Bush whether, in retrospect, that statement was false. Bush replied, “I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror. In other words, we were attacked, and therefore every threat had to be reanalyzed. Every threat had to be looked at. Every potential harm to America had to be judged in the context of this war on terror.”
You can hear the gears turning in Bush’s mind. We were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. That attack exposed a new reality. That new reality changed the context for interpreting intelligence. Or, as Howard Dean less charitably puts it, if Bush and his administration “have a theory and a fact, and [the two] don’t coincide, they get rid of the fact instead of the theory.”
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That’s the Bush syllogism: The evidence says one thing; the conclusion says another; therefore, the evidence is false.