You Can Make It With Plato - Bush's difficult relationship with reality

William Saletan has a good explanation of Bush lying.

Plato believed that what's real isn't the things you can touch and see: your computer, your desk, those empty barrels in Iraq that Bush thought were full of chemical weapons. What's real is the general idea of these things. The idea of a computer. The idea of a desk. The idea of an Iraqi threat to the United States. Whether you actually have a computer or a desk, or whether Saddam Hussein actually had chemical weapons, is less important than the larger truth. The abstraction is the reality.

Plato's successor, Aristotle, took a different view. He thought reality was measured by what you could touch and see. That's the definition of reality on which modern science was founded. It's the definition Colin Powell used when he told the world Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. It's the definition David Kay used when he set out to find the weapons. Kay and Powell are dismayed by our inability to see and touch the weapons. But Bush isn't. He isn't going to let Aristotle's reality distract him from Plato's.

In Bush's Platonic reality, the world is dangerous, threats exist, and the evidence of our senses must be interpreted to fit that larger truth.

Bush accomplished exactly what he set out to do in this interview: He showed you how his mind works. Republicans used to observe derisively that Clinton had a difficult relationship with the truth. Bush has a difficult relationship with the truth, too. It's just a different—and perhaps more grave—kind of difficulty.