Informed Speculation

The ten years in question is the length of time the Weekly Standard has been published. The Standard is considered, of course, the house organ of neoconservatism (gasp!), but like all magazines, it’s both more and less than that, as Bill Kristol explains in an informative look back. I was particularly intrigued by this passage:

Among the most important lessons I’ve learned, blindingly obvious though it might at first appear, is one I think applies with equal force not just to Washington journalists but also to the people we write about–and to our readers. It concerns a central, chronic misunderstanding of modern political life. Let’s call it “the fallacy of hidden design.”

Men and women in public life are nowadays constantly confronted–much to their exasperation, as I recall from my own past life in government–by reporters who have trouble believing in the possibility of a news story whose deepest meaning isn’t in some sense a secret. It cannot be, so these reporters suppose, that the president has made his most recent pronouncement or decision simply because he thought it, on balance, the right and timely thing to do. At least it cannot mostly be that. There must also be some strategy afoot–probably a cynical or selfish one related to some interest group, polling demographic, or whatnot.

But the president’s aides would tell you–correctly, in my experience–that top-level, behind-the-scenes Washington doesn’t actually work like this. It can’t: People are too busy, there are too many competing agendas to juggle, there’s not enough time, in-boxes and calendars are too full, and five big things still have to get done by 6 o’clock whether you’ve perfected them or not. Under the circumstances, then, the best and much the safest thing a politician can usually hope to do is play it straight, with minimal calculation. Generally speaking, the clearest and most reliable expressions of a public figure’s intentions are his own words and deeds. Put another way: The most accurate and intelligent interpretation of the news tends to be the one that best concentrates its attention not on some imagined, backstage Wizard of Oz, but on what’s happening in front of the curtain, for all to see and hear.

That strikes me as very wise and quite true, and I can’t help but think of Frank Rich when I read that.

Rich, as we shall see later tonight when his latest goes up on the New York Times web page, feverishly tries to construct a coherent narrative out of every piece of anti-Bush propaganda he can lay his hands on week after week. You can be sure that not many columns will go by before you hear about Jeff Gannon, fake news, Mission Accomplished, no WMDs, and now, cronyism at FEMA (I’m projecting the subject of tonight’s column, sight unseen, if you’re keeping score).

This attempt at counter-narrative has long been a staple of journalism of the left: in fact, you might call Rich Hunter S. Thompson without the talent. For whatever reason, conspiracy dwells deep in the progressive mindset; perhaps it’s an instinctual distrust of authority that leads one to both the political stance and the mental state. In any event, Rich could benefit from Kristol’s column; sometimes things just happen because that’s the way they happened.

In other words, it may very well be that we believed the intelligence on WMDs, and were wrong; that we underestimated the strength of the insurgency, and thus didn’t bring enough troops; or that we just plain didn’t think that anything as awful as Katrina would really occur to New Orleans, despite all the warnings. Or it may be that all of these things are false, but that our priorities were elsewhere.

The problem comes when one goes from events to motives: there were no WMDS in Iraq, thus Bush lied; mostly poor, mostly black people died from Katrina, so Bush doesn’t care about black people; Bush won two elections with small margins, so he must have stolen them. The pattern couldn’t be clearer, and it lies at the heart of the counter-narrative the progressives try to fashion from American history. The Howard Zinns, the Noam Chomskys, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy buffs: the one thing that unites them all is a belief that the real story lies hidden, that base motives are under all misfortunes, that America can’t be trusted, that history is the story ‘they’ want you to see.

Food for thought, as we approach the anniversary of just one such horrible event, one that resulted from a real conspiracy of Islamic fanatics, that horrible day four years ago when 3,000 of our countrymen were murdered by al Qaeda. Even this event is not immune from the tendency to counter-interpret, though, blessedly, the loony 9/11 theories haven’t gained many adherents in this country (though they have a huge foothold in parts of Europe and the Middle East). It bears repeating: some bad things happen because they just happen, and some really do result from evil intentions, and it’s the better part of wisdom to rationally seperate the two.