In article ,
"Roger Long" wrote:

The real political divide is no longer between liberal and conservative.
It's between thinking and not thinking. One view of the world holds that
you assemble all the facts, discard the ones that are not consistent with
your ideology and preconceptions, and then use what is left over to develop
a policy. The other approach is to assemble all the facts, sort them for
consistency, assemble the best planning model possible from them, and then
develop a policy. The problem with the latter is it takes longer and
requires a lot more leadership. This isn't a Republican vs. Democrat issue.
Neither party has a monopoly on either wisdom or stupidity. Bush however,
has surrounded himself entirely (except perhaps for Colin Powell) with the
former kind of thinkers.


Very well said, and very true (and I'm no great Kerry supporter -- not
yet, anyway).

Re the Bush admin in particular, for a while one might have cited Paul
O'Neill, and maybe Christie Whitman, along with Colin Powell. Having
just finished reading "The Price of Loyalty" by Ron Suskind, the book
about O'Neill's career as Secretary of the Treasury, I'd recommend it as
a very informative casebook on the above theme, as well as a very
entertaining read, regardless of your politics. (O'Neill voted for Bush
and says at the end he probably would again).

Notable quote from p. 114:

"O'Neill knew that Whitman had never heard the President
analyze acomplex issue, parse opposing positions, and settle
on a judicious path. In fact, no one -- inside or outside the
government, here or across the globe -- had heard him do
that to any significant degree. And that, O'Neill decided,
was what Whitman was getting at with the word "credibility."
It was not just the President's credibility around the world.
It was credibility with his most senior officials."

The really serious concern is that the Rove/Cheney/Karen Hughes axis
doesn't just "discard" facts they don't like, they actively suppress
them -- and then lie about them. Bush himself doesn't necessarily do
the same. Concepts like "facts" or "thinking" or "parse intelligently
arrayed opposing positions" just aren't terms relevant to his mental
processes.