Unreal, Isn't It?

We've discussed the Bush cabal's aversion to reality before. Now Arianna Huffington picks up the theme, saying that when the facts are against them, the Bush cabal argue the very existence of facts.

As pretty much every fact has turned against the administration in Iraq, the fallback position has increasingly become: well, who can really know anything? Everything is so complex. You've got Sunnis, you've got Shiites, you've got Kurds...the truth is...well, the truth is that we can't know the truth...so how can we be held accountable when nothing is really knowable?

Of course Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their cohorts didn't invent this way of thinking. The funny thing is that the very people who claim to be moral absolutists from the heartland turn out to be arguing a variation of postmodernism -- an Eastern elitist linguistic theory laden with moral relativism.

Here's the short version of postmodernism, via Wikipedia (I know I'm distilling a bit, but this is not, after all, a peer-reviewed academic blog):

'In the broadest sense, denial of objectivity is held to be the postmodern position, and a hostility towards claims advanced on the basis of objectivity its defining feature... all standards are arbitrary and meaningless.'

Sound like any defense secretaries you know?

Huffington digs up some choice Rummy quotes to prove her analysis. Here he is at a recent DoD press briefing, asked about the number of Iraqi security forces that are ready to conduct operations on their own:

"Trying to get a single, simple answer for a complex situation where you have, I'm going to guess, 15 or 20 different categories of Iraqi security forces that have different purposes, different training, different equipment -- so the number is 171,500 currently, last time I looked -- last week. But it's made up of apples and oranges. So it isn't useful to try to oversimplify."

Here he is when Tim Russert asked him: "Did you make a misjudgment about the cost of the war?"

"I never estimated the cost of the war. And how can one estimate the cost in lives or the cost in money? I've avoided it consistently. And how can that be a misestimate? We've said that there are always going to be unknowns, that the battle was going to change, depending on what the enemy does and how they adjust and how we adjust..."