Incuriosity seems characteristic of the entire Bush administration. More, it seems central to its very operation. The administration seems indifferent to data, impervious to competing viewpoints and ideas. Policy is not adjusted to facts; facts are adjusted to policy. The result is what may be the nation's first medieval presidency — one in which reality is ignored for the administration's own prevailing vision. And just as in medieval days, this willful ignorance can lead to terrible consequences.

[...]

The difference between the current administration and its conservative forebears is that facts don't seem to matter at all. They don't even matter enough to reinterpret. Bush doesn't read the papers or watch the news, and Condoleezza Rice, his national security advisor, reportedly didn't read the National Intelligence Estimate, which is apparently why she missed the remarks casting doubt on claims that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa. (She reportedly read the document later.) And although Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hasn't disavowed reading or watching the news, he has publicly and proudly disavowed paying any attention to it. In this administration, everyone already knows the truth.

A more sinister aspect to this presidency's cavalier attitude toward facts is its effort to bend, twist and distort them when it apparently serves the administration's interests.

[...]

Every administration spins the facts to its advantage. As the old adage goes, "Figures don't lie but liars do figure." But the White House medievalists aren't just shading the facts. In actively denying or changing them, they are changing the basis on which government has traditionally been conducted: rationality. There is no respect for facts because there is no respect for empiricism. Instead, the Bush ideologues came to power smug in the security of their own worldview, part of which, frankly, seems to be the belief that it would be soft and unmanly to let facts alter their preconceptions. Like the church confronting Galileo, they aren't about to let reality destroy their cosmology, whether it is a bankrupt plan for pacifying an Iraq that was supposed to welcome us as liberators or a bankrupt fiscal plan that was supposed to jolt the economy back to health.

[...]

A presidency without doubt and resistant to disconcerting facts is a presidency not on the road to Damascus but on the road to disaster. By regarding facts as political tools, it compromises information and makes reality itself suspect, not to mention that it compromises the agencies that provide the information and makes them unreliable in the future. And by ignoring anything that contradicts its faith, it can vaingloriously plow ahead — right into the abyss.

[link via Daily Kos]

It's a little difficult for me to tell, living as I do in what amounts to something of a liberal political bubble, but it seems to me that things are starting to come to a head about Bush -- at least, that's the way it feels. This could certainly be nothing more than wishful thinking on my part, but I sense in the media, and in the general attitude of people -- some of whom would be among the last I would expect to abandon Bush -- the ever-growing feeling that things are very, very wrong in Washington. (Alright, perhaps less so in the media, but I've been surprised more than once by a friend of family member who is generally conservative but has spoken out to me against this administration, or at least given my complaints a respectful listen, something that wouldn't have happened in the past.) It's hard to know whether this disaffection and dissatisfaction can translate into a concrete result like the overthrow of the Bush regime (through a legitimate presidential election, I hasten to add, lest anyone reading this be tempted to wield the Patriot Act against me), but it is enough to keep my hopes alive.