The Los Angeles Times should rename Jonathan Chait’s Friday column “More Reasons I Hate George Bush.”

Last week, Chait was irked that the President gets exercise (see our post “LAT Columnist Prefers Presidents that are Fat and Undisciplined“).

This week he wraps up his column “How Bush thinks: intuition over intellect” with:

The point isn’t just that Bush refuses to engage with facts he finds inconvenient. (Many fail that test.) It’s that Bush rejects reason itself.

What fact pattern does he get to this conclusion? He uses one incorrect, dated assertion about Bush’s attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to make his argument airtight, finds a second piece of ‘evidence:’ — a quote from one of the 2000 presidential debates. Yes, 2000 — the one with Al Gore.

The latter is inconsequential.

On Russia, Chait complains that after their first meeting in 2001, Bush intuited that he could trust Putin. That may have been good or bad judgement, but Chait’s problem seems to be that Bush took any measure of Putin at all.

Chait then latches on to a Bush quote from the late 2003 Camp David summit, that

Two years later, he (Bush) was still praising Putin’s desire for “a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive.”

To Chait, this is proof that Bush’s mind was closed on Putin — Bush had decided in 2001 that Putin was trustworthy, period.

But a joint press conference opening a summit, isn’t this what any President should be saying? A gentle hint that Putin is saying the right things, but that the U.S. expects him to live up to those statements? Read the transcript for yourself.

Chait cites this diplomacy-speak to ‘prove’ “facts don’t matter” to Bush and that new evidence has “barely any effect” on him.

Chait ignores the inconvenient fact that US policy toward Russia has changed. And it inconveniently destroys his thesis.

This past February, Condoleeza Rice mentioned concerns about Russian democracy several times during a European trip. In April, she went on Russian radio and “accused Mr Putin of wielding too much power and called for a free and independent media in Russia.” Rice told CNN immediately before meeting Putin that “Our goal has been to seek to persuade him that a strong and vibrant and vital Russia in the 21st century cannot be founded on a state that is so centralized, that does not permit alternative voices in the media”

And she floated this:

Talking to journalists en route to Moscow, she suddenly turned personal, criticizing Putin himself. She condemned Putin for concentrating power in the executive branch, at the expense of the legislative branch and the judiciary. She said that Washington is gravely concerned about this. Rice also mentioned the abolition of direct elections for regional leaders. Last but not least, she stunned everyone by saying that she hopes Putin will step down in 2008 without trying for a third term. “It wouldn’t be a positive development at all,” Rice said, “if it requires amendments [to the Constitution to enable Putin to run for president again - Kommersant]. “I hope it will not happen. We are taking Putin at his word.” This is the first time a senior official of the US Administration has made such a bold statement concerning the president of Russia.

Does Condoleeza Rice voice these thoughts to the international press on a whim? Does she freelance? Or are they carefully planned with her boss … George Bush? Don’t they represent a shift in U.S. attitude toward Putin and Russia — exactly the kind of shift Chait thinks Bush is incapable of?

To Chait, Bush’s alleged inflexibility means he rejects reason —

Reason is a process by which we draw our broader conclusions from an accumulation of specific evidence. When the evidence changes (”Hey, this Putin guy seems to be squelching dissent”), our conclusions can also (”Perhaps he doesn’t love democracy as much as he said he did!”).

But the facts of Chait’s own Russia example show that the President does alter course based on new evidence. Chait’s argument is simply wrong.

The question is whether Chait knew it when he wrote it. One would have to think so. So when he wrote about Bush:

Facts don’t matter to him. What matters is how he feels about the person in question.

… he should have been writing about himself.

Technorati Tags: jonathan chait, LA Times, LAT, Los Angeles Times, george bush

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2005 at 2:23 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.