Bush Leads a Medieval Presidency

Daily Kos has a good summary of a LA Times commentary.

All Presidents lie. Presidents are, after all, politicians. Idealists who believe their candidate for high office is immune to the temptations of deception are destined for heartbreak.

But lying is not Gabler’s point. It's new behavior that disturbs him.

[T]he White House medievalists aren't just shading the facts. In actively denying or changing them, they are changing the basis on which government has traditionally been conducted: rationality. There is no respect for facts because there is no respect for empiricism. Instead, the Bush ideologues came to power smug in the security of their own worldview, part of which, frankly, seems to be the belief that it would be soft and unmanly to let facts alter their preconceptions. Like the church confronting Galileo, they aren't about to let reality destroy their cosmology, whether it is a bankrupt plan for pacifying an Iraq that was supposed to welcome us as liberators or a bankrupt fiscal plan that was supposed to jolt the economy to health. …

Bush has a religious epistemology. Having devalued the idea of an observable, verifiable reality and having eschewed rational empiricism, he relies on his unalterable faith in himself not just to inform his policies, as all presidents have, but to dictate them.

Exactly.

It’s not the know-nothingism of this Administration that should scare us. It's not even the lies. It’s the studied disregard for facts, combined with a twisting of facts, combined with a profound ignorance of the world-at-large, combined with a severe superiority complex. This supercombo is what makes matters so grim.