Remember this:

Josh Marshall has a 4,600 word essay in the Washington Monthly called The Post-Modern President. It's a good read. We especially like this excerpt: (emphasis added)

Many of the administration's policy arguments have amounted to predictions--tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower--that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn't be definitely disproven until events played out in the future. In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration's main obstacle has been the experts themselves--the economists who didn't trust the budget projections, the generals who didn't buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts--a task that comes particularly easy to the revisionists who drive Bush administration policy.

And then there is this disturbing excerpt:

When [the Bush administration] went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration's take on economic policy, environmental policy, and in almost every sort of policy question involving science.

When people are acting contrary to science, you've got a very serious problem.

Josh Marshall also has a few words about his article at his main stomping ground, TPM.

ADDENDUM: Marshall also writes in the essay:

The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or--failing that--to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along.

For the definitive analysis of Bush's up-is-downism, Salon's Ruben Bolling has a great cartoon.

posted by Quiddity at 9/02/2003 08:49:00 AM