What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.


By Elton Beard

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. I don't.


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ARCHIVE ARCHIVE ARCHIVE

Sunday, October 13, 2002
4:00 PM PDT
William Kristol
Just a heads-up: the Bush administration will now commence to deceive us. For our own good. This according to William Kristol, who in a Washington Post editorial entitled "From Truth to Deception" first explains how the administration's strategy of openness, truth-telling and rational debate based on a careful weighing of well-verified facts has united the country:

What accounts for the president's success? Primarily it's the clarity, toughness and straightforwardness with which he has marshaled his arguments. There have been impressively serious and high-minded speeches, for example to the United Nations on Sept. 12 and in Cincinnati on Monday. There has been the release of information and the presentation of arguments, including the national security strategy in late September.
Unfortunately, according to Kristol, the impressively serious and high-minded straightforwardness of this administration cannot continue as "now the president has to move from building support for a war to fighting a war":
This will require a change in the president's manner of speaking. He has benefited, in making the case for war, from an impressive clarity of presentation and lucidity of argument. But now his task is not to educate or persuade us. It is to defeat Saddam Hussein. And that will require the president, at times, to mislead rather than to clarify, to deceive rather than to explain.
Kristol assures us that the pending war is a done deal, one which the administration will not allow to be thwarted by the institution of effective Iraqi weapons inspections. "The coming U.N. Security Council machinations are better understood as a prelude to war than as a real effort at persuasion", he explains helpfully. There is practically no risk that peace will break out:
So when the president seems to equivocate about whether war is inevitable, when he holds out hope for inspections, when he talks about giving peace one last chance, when he seems to invite coups and rebellions while implying this might prevent an American occupation, supporters of the president's policy shouldn't worry that he is losing focus or retreating from the moral and strategic clarity of the past six weeks.

In other words, don't believe anything Mr. Bush says.

Hey, I already knew that!

Now, the scholarly neo-conservative editor of the Weekly Standard is no stranger to the Washington scene, and his own bio describes William Kristol as "one of the nation's leading political analysts". Does he really believe that the administration's arguments - which even the pro-war editors of The New Republic have found "unconvincing" - are clear and straightforward, or is he merely practicing what Dwight Meredith calls tactical hubris in an attempt to make war less evitable? He editorializes, you decide.

But Kristol is correct about one thing - in the future, members of the Bush administration will undoubtedly be employing techniques of misdirection, secrecy and deception. In that they will remain constant.

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Busy, busy, busy.

What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.


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