Bush's War

For anyone who did not catch Bush's War on Frontline earlier this week, I highly recommend watching it on the PBS website.

I think the thing that struck me most was Dick Cheney's performance on Meet the Press on September 2, 2002. He talked about Saddam Hussein's alleged attempts to obtain aluminum tubes in order to build centrifuges with which to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. He cites a story in that morning's New York Times and says "I want to attribute the Times" rather than talking about specific intelligence. Of course, when he cites the New York Times he is really just citing himself because his office was the source of the information in Judith Miller's article.

I find it maddening when people excuse the Bush administration's failure to turn up Saddam's weapons of mass destruction on the grounds that "Everyone else thought he had them, too." Of course, it was the Bush administration that was telling everyone that it possessed the evidence that showed he had them. So in effect, they are pleading as excuse the fact that the administration managed to convince everyone of something that wasn't true.

Of course, the notion that everyone believing a thing is just as good as having evidence for the belief is well known to Christian apologists. The whole "minimal facts" approach to apologetics championed by Gary Habermas is premised on scholars agreeing on certain facts and inferring the existence of evidence to support those facts from scholarly consensus. It is like citing as evidence the fact that 10,000 Cub fans look at the same fuzzy picture in the sports section and conclude that the Cubs had been robbed by an umpire's call. The evidence is still just one fuzzy picture.