News Flash: Bush Too Honest.
Also: War Peace, Freedom Slavery, Ignorance Strength

David Brooks claims that the Bush Administration's big problem re: international affairs is that it is too honest.

I am not making this up. I do not know what to say about it. Some things are so absurd they can't be parodied. Brooks's piece is one of those things.

I used to think that Brooks might be one of the good guys. Why did I think that? Apparently because I am an idiot. That became apparent to me about two paragraphs into this piece:

"Now his administration has taken to honesty like a drunken
sailor. It has made a fetish of candor and forthrightness.
Things are wildly out of control."

I was out the door of my office almost before I realized that I had smashed my fist down onto my keyboard, causing some of the keys to shoot off. I walked around a bit. I drove around a bit. I went into a deep despair about mankind and the prospects for democracy.

I am approximately as alarmed as I could possibly be about the direction of political discourse in this country. We are, of course, used to both lies and meta-lies--lies about lying. And i suppose there's no longer any use in denying that the American Right has begun to use the "big lie" strategy with alarming frequency. But now we seem to have entered a new era in the history of mendacity--the era of the big meta-lie. At least Nixon had the decency to keep his most famous meta-lie--"I am not a crook"--modest. But those days are behind us. Now we are being told that this administration--an administration at least as deceitful as the Nixon administration--is not only not dishonest, not only ordinarily honest, not only unusually honest, but far too honest. Honest literally to a fault. It is, Brooks says at one point--I am not making this up--"drunk on truth serum."

This is, I think, the biggest goddamn lie I've ever heard.