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The problem of trust
Among the many wounds in the tattered marriage of George W. Bush and the conservatives is the loss of trust. The president and his surrogates over and over said that conservatives could “trust” his judgment on Harriet Miers, could “trust” his view of her as a political and judicial conservative; and therefore that all carping over her should cease. But even some of Miers’s most persistent supporters, at Powerline and Captain’s Quarters for instance, eventually came to the view, based on Miers’s own writings, that she is not a conservative, and not a centrist, but a liberal. President Bush also said that people could trust his judgment that Miers was highly qualified, yet the embarrassing evidence—her published articles—showed her to be intellectually substandard, at least as far as the expectations placed on a Supreme Court justice are concerned. So how can conservatives trust Bush’s judgments and assurances in such matters again, and how can he ever ask them to trust him, short of a complete act of self-criticism and repentance on his part, which, of course, is not going to happen?
And the problem, of course, is not limited to the matter of judicial appointments. Bush’s entire foreign policy has been based on the wild, unfounded hope that installing a constitutional democracy in Iraq will somehow make the terror insurgency disappear, will lead to an Iraq at peace with the non-Muslim world, and will inspire other Muslim countries to adopt democracy as well. These assurances are presented by Bush and Condoleezza Rice and their journalistic supporters not in the form of a reasoned argument based on evidence, but in the form of a credo, a credo endlessly repeated, the authority of which is derived from trust in Bush’s exceptional reliability and grasp of the truth. Such trust was never justified, but now, as with the Miers nomination, it will become harder and harder for even his most devoted acolytes to maintain it. Email entry |