By Arianna Huffington
HuffingtonPost.com
May 28, 2008
Click here for the original article
Photo of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan from the San Francisco Sentinel
“Take Five: Truthiness in Government”
Stephen Colbert satirized the Bush approach when he coined the concept of “truthiness”: the truth we want, in our gut, to exist, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
McClellan reveals how much the joke matched the reality, saying that Bush’s “leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate.” Citing Bush’s assertion that he honestly couldn’t remember if he’d ever done cocaine, McClellan says he felt he “was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true.”
But who needs reality when you have faith? Who needs truth when you have truthiness? As George Costanza put it on Seinfeld: “Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
A fantastic philosophy for a sit-com character. A disastrous philosophy for a sitting president.
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