[L]et's assume that Bush and Cheney are not consciously making decisions that they think are bad for America. In other words, let's assume they're not evil, as many of my friends seem to think. The truly interesting question is epistemological - how does Bush come to know what he thinks is good for America. Upon what evidence does Bush come to a conclusion that a given policy will either hurt or help working class families? These questions form the heart of my critique of this administration. It's not that they are consciously making bad decisions, it's that they are incapable of knowing what's good. The world of Bush and Cheney is a bubble world - a privileged existence in which they are never forced to interact with ordinary Americans.

Let's take Bush - and let's assume that Bush sits down in the Oval Office and says to himself, "How will this policy affect working class Americans." So here's the problem - because Bush has never interacted with ordinary Americans, how can he possibly know? He was born into one of Connecticut's most presitigious families. He attended East Coast prep schools. He went to Yale and Harvard Business School. Then, he worked for big business and for the Texas Rangers. As both Governor and President, he spends his time around rich businessmen and lobbyists. He crisscrosses the country attending $2,000-a-plate dinners. He doesn't go out and interact with voters. In part because of legitimate security concerns, protestors are blocked from his fundraising trips. And when he does give a speech, it's usually a very controlled environment where his views will not be challenged. So I'll ask again - how does he know a thing about the needs of ordinary Americans? I'm not saying this as a campaign talking point and I'm not arguing that Bush is bad or doesn't care - I'm asking how Bush comes to know, in an epistemological sense, what Americans need. What's his evidence and where does he get it?

He told Brit Hume he doesn't read the papers. O'Neill portrays him as a man who depends upon the political wing (i.e. Rove and Co.) for all his information. So, if Bush gets everything secondhand, the secondhand sources must be trusted to convey the needs and fears and concerns of ordinary Americans. I'm not sure Rove can do this. Again, even if I concede that Bush is a "good guy," I question whether his bubble-world of privilege can provide him with the raw data points that are necessary to determine what will help people. It's for this reason that he can satisfy himself that free trade is good for people - because it looks good on the Wall Street Journal front page. It's for this same reason that Cheney can say that deficits don't matter - because higher interests rates don't affect anything other than his stock portfolio. If you had to mortgage a house or finance college, then deficits would sure as hell matter. But Cheney, like Bush, now lives in a world of fund-raising and lobbying where he only interacts with people who are disproportionately wealthy and favor pro-business policies. This isolation skews the data he uses to make judgments.

That reminds me of this, from Michael Tomasky's New York Times review of Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty, about Paul O'Neill's time in the Bush administration:

When O'Neill worked in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, Suskind writes, he served presidents whom he respected as policy makers, whatever their other faults, for two reasons: first, they were knowledgeable about the details of policy; and second, they made it a point to have their aides present them with different, and sometimes starkly warring, points of view. Nixon called on the Office of Management and Budget (where O'Neill worked) to prepare so-called Brandeis briefs, named after Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court, that presented thorough analyses of opposing arguments and made everyone ''really think deeply about the ideal of good government and how to get there,'' in O'Neill's words. The people in the room may have all been from one political party or shared a general world view. But they understood that when spending the people's money and acting on behalf of the entire country, including that segment that did not vote for their president, their obligation to fact-based inquiry and rigorous testing of hypotheses was self-evident.

This book serves as that standard's obituary notice. First, Bush himself is portrayed as disturbingly unengaged. From O'Neill's first meeting with him through his last, Bush asked some questions here and there about politics and perception, but he rarely asked a specific question on a policy matter. The weekend after the Sept. 11 attacks, when O'Neill was among the group invited to Camp David to discuss responses, he espied a large stack of intelligence briefings brought by the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and found himself thinking, ''I hope the president really reads this carefully. It's kind of his job.''

Second, O'Neill smelled at many high-level meetings the odor of a conversation set up in advance to drive the discussion toward the conclusion that Rove and the political team had already settled upon. One example: At a meeting on steel tariffs, which the administration put in place in 2002 against all free-market principle, O'Neill could tell where things were going when the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, ''made several oblique references to 'political realities.' '' The pattern repeated itself over and over, on tax cuts and the economy and energy policy and Iraq. In time, O'Neill grew aghast, and went to his old friend Cheney to suggest that the administration try Brandeis briefs. But Cheney -- the book's chief villain and, if Suskind and O'Neill are to be believed, our functional president -- just sat passively. ''He thanked Paul, as always, 'for his sharp insights,' '' Suskind writes. And that was the end of it.

"Brandeis briefs" are one kind of mechanism that a president (or any executive in danger of being isolated by virtue of the necessities and perquisites of office) can use to make sure they get as rounded and complete a view of things as possible, and the rejection of those mechanisms, in favor of more incestuous sources of data, typifies all that is wrong with this administration.

To further compound the problem, even if the president's advisors wanted to give him honest and frank appraisals from various viewpoints, they are incapable of doing so by the nature of who they are and how they were selected, since they administration insists on both intense loyalty (or, actually, fealty) and on lockstep adherence to accepted ideology with only a small amount of variation permitted. Those are hardly conditons which lend themselves to frank and open discussion, such as a president more secure in his intellect and manhood would not only allow, but actively encourage.

I don't necessarily think that Bush is evil. Weak, yes. Intellectually stunted, yes. Uncertain about his virility, yes. But not necessarily evil per se. (About Cheney I have some reservations, but let's say for the sake of argument that he's not inherently evil either.)

Still, it hardly matters, because it does not require evil people in order that evil things be done. History is rife with evil that resulted from the actions of people who carried with them nothing but the very best of intentions, or who acted as best as they could under the circumstances, by the standards of their time and with the information available to them. So if evil can be done by good men, then certainly it can also be done by ethically- and morally- challenged men like Bush and Cheney, whether or not they intend it.

Which is to say that we should judge their administration by what it does and the results that come about from their actions or failures to act, and by this standard one could certainly make a case that evil has resulted from the works of Bush & Cheney, regardless of their intentions. We will likely be digging our way out of the various economic, political and international morasses they've gotten us into for many, many years to come.

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters (1943)

"A thoroughly nasty business concern" is as good a short description of the Bush administration as I've seen for quite a while.