Bush's aversion to facts

DURING A recent trip to Florida, I talked to a voter who had come to see President Bush at a rally in the Broward County community of Sunrise. She backed Bush because he was a strong leader in a time of terrorism, she explained.

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"He is the right guy for the times," she said, adding that the war in Iraq "is something that has to be done."

Did she have any second thoughts about the war, given that no operational ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda have been revealed and that no weapons of mass destruction have been found?

Didn't we find some of those weapons, she asked?

No, she was told, there have been none of the WMD stockpiles whose existence the administration claimed to be certain of.

That didn't seem to faze her.

"Well, there was something fishy going on over there," she said.

She was, in other words, content to take this administration at its word that the war it waged was a necessary one. In a way, that's not surprising. The president insists that Iraq is a fundamental part of the war on terror -- and, despite the 9/11 commission's conclusion that there was no "collaborative relationship," Vice President Cheney in particular has continued to suggest significant ties between the deposed Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda.

Now, it's one thing to have voters whose decisions are based on instinct rather than evidence.

But it's something quite different when the administration itself isn't concerned with the facts.

And yet, that's become a painfully obvious failing of this president. In the run-up to the war, as has become apparent, the administration looked for intelligence to bolster its preconceptions about Iraq, ignored that which did not, and, too impatient to wait for more investigation, essentially refused to take no WMD for an answer.

In his reelection campaign, George W. Bush has made the claim that he would have invaded Iraq knowing neither ties to Al Qaeda nor WMD would be found. Even by the lenient standards of political campaigns, that is an extraordinary statement. It suggests that the president was either misleading the nation back in 2002 and early 2003 about his reasons for going to war or that he is hoodwinking voters as he seeks reelection.

And earlier this month, when Charles Duelfer, the chief weapons inspector, issued a report saying that Saddam had destroyed his WMDs after the 1991 Gulf War and that Iraq's capacity to produce them had actually decayed, the president still insisted his invasion decision was the right one, noting that Duelfer also said Saddam hoped to reconstitute his WMD programs if he could slip free of UN sanctions. Further, Bush said, Saddam "could have passed [WMD] knowledge on to our terrorist enemies."

We've seen the same disdain for the truth, the facts, or just basic common sense on any number of other fronts. The president, for example, said his large tax-cut package wouldn't throw the budget into deficit. Then, when the budget began hemorrhaging red ink, the administration blamed the huge deficits on the economic slump, and said the tax cuts were a necessary economic remedy, despite their clear slant toward upper earners, who are anything but efficient pump primers. The recession contributed to the deficit, certainly -- but the Congressional Budget Office has said that two-thirds of the 2004 deficit comes because of Bush's top-heavy tax cuts.

Meanwhile, it's hard to think of an administration so at odds with science. The Bush team, after all, has suppressed its own EPA's conclusions about global warming. And in an October report that echoed broad concerns in the scientific community, the Union of Concerned Scientists asserted that "the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented."

Abandon facts and evidence, and all a president has to guide him is ideology, instinct, or faith. Indeed, in an eyebrow-raising story in the Oct. 17 New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind reports that this president increasingly relies on gut instinct and religious faith, rather than the reality of the secular world.

But it's imperative for any president that the facts be paramount.

As Bush himself said on Wednesday: "A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."

His comment was directed at John Kerry. And yet, it's hard to put the case against George W. Bush's mode of governance much more succinctly than that.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.