Scooter and Me

Professing liberal doubt in an age of fundamentalist fervor

By Nick Bromell

When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions.

—F. A. Hayek, Why I Am Not a Conservative

Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us that the history we’re moving through finds its ultimate significance within us: “We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here.” Certainly this has been true for me. As I’ve looked out upon the public history of the past six years, my eyes have beheld the same ribbon of events everyone else has seen. But the meaning of this history has been strongly shaped and intensified by a purely accidental twist in my own private experience. I went away to boarding schools in the early 1960s, and at one of these my best friend was a boy named Scooter—Lewis “Scooter” Libby—who grew up to become Paul Wolfowitz’s protégé, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and one of the Bush administration’s strongest advocates for the war in Iraq....

... So, for six years I’ve been obsessed with Scooter. Every time I read a newspaper, I see Scooter and me hunched over a game of Stratego (which he usually won), or I see him faking right before hooking left so I can hit him with a pass in the end zone. Walking my dog through the woods around our house, I chant the mantra of questions I literally ache to ask him: How could you work for an administration that denies global warming and supports tax breaks for large SUVs? How could you work for an administration that cuts funding for birth control to the poorest people in our country and the world? How could you so brazenly exaggerate the threat of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and how could you so foolishly imagine that American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad with cheers and flowers?...

...This difference came into sharp focus when I happened to read an article by Lynne Cheney, the wife of his boss. As an English professor, I couldn’t resist its title: “The Roots of Today’s Lying Epidemic: The English Department Virus.” In it, Cheney claims that lowly English departments are “a primary source of the epidemic of lying currently upon us.”

I assume that Scooter knows Lynne Cheney well, laughs with her at the dinner table, brings his family over to the vice president’s mansion, and considers her a friend much as he thinks of me as an old buddy. And so, accused now of lying himself, he must know that she regards me and my colleagues as condoners of lying, and my life’s work as a major contribution to the problem of lying that besets our country. Of course I’m angered. And hurt. But once I get past these feelings, and past the words kettle and black, I begin to see that Cheney’s views are useful because they bring into view the essence of the conflict that is tearing us all—friends, nation, world—apart.

Cheney begins by claiming correctly that most English professors believe that “knowledge and power are always intertwined.” But she goes on to assert that as a consequence of this belief, we also maintain that “there is no such thing as truth.” This is false, and I suspect that she knows it’s false. Certainly it’s illogical. Cheney’s error, possibly deliberate, is her sleight-ofhand removal of the definite article the from its crucial place beside the noun truth. Yes, most English professors and intellectuals today do believe that knowledge and power are intertwined. But no, we do not maintain that there is no such thing as truth. We believe, rather, that there is no such thing as the truth, no such thing as truth conceived of as an eternal verity standing apart from power and outside the push and pull of human history... http://tinyurl.com/2fvkxc [Open in new window]...
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Fantastic article.
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