"Loyalty" And Other Matters

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"Loyalty" And Other Matters
Margie Burns
August 09, 2005

Multiple references to George W. Bush’s “loyalty” to his personnel are a symptom of chronic shallow assumptions. Some fundamentals, here:

– The Chief Executive of the United States owes his loyalty to his country, not to a few insiders. If John Bolton and Stephen Hadley and Condoleezza Rice did wrong in their responses to 9/11 and their war-boosting against Iraq-and they did do wrong, repeatedly-then they should be asked to resign. If they won’t resign voluntarily, they should be fired. A genuinely loyal president would ask his long-suffering speechwriters to address the firings with the most graceful language possible, under the disgraceful circumstances.

– The apparent assumption that George Walker Bush proceeds in personnel matters on a basis of “loyalty” is not borne out by his treatment of Richard Clarke, Lawrence Lindsey, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, General Shinseki, Joseph Wilson and General Zinni among others. If a theory doesn’t fit the known facts, you can’t make it viable by simply throwing out any facts that the theory does not fit.

– Of the three legs to the footstool of case-motive, means and opportunity-the weakest by far is motive, when one is trying to evaluate a stranger or a complex history. A “motive” is too easy to come up with. If you had told me that the late Mother Theresa was moonlighting as an exotic dancer, I could come up with a motive-but the key facts have to come first. Imagining a motive, for good or ill, and then becoming wedded to that motive as an explanation for some person’s actions is self-delusion, Pygmalion in reverse. Logically, when we’re dealing with a large number of unknowns (like the numerous people working for Bush and their often-unnamed allies out of office), it’s better to focus on facts. It is a fact that Bush has gotten rid of some people. It is a fact that he has not gotten rid of others. My conclusion thus far is that several people he has not gotten rid of have harmed this nation and the globe. But rather than trying to fathom all the motives of an odd individual whose talent never matched his ambition, it’s better to ascertain the who, what, when, where and how behind the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, for example.

– More fundamentally, the core mistake in evaluating the Bush administration through the prism of an assumed “loyalty” is that it is arguing from a conclusion. In informal logic, this is called circular argument or begging the question (which does not mean asking for or raising a question). It is not a given that Bush is loyal just because some well-established journalist said he was.

– Once we recognize logically that “loyalty” as a motive is not a given, it becomes possible to come up with other hypotheses. For example, it is highly possible that Bush fears to fire some personnel who could then drop the dime on him or on others in his administration. John R. Bolton is not only a basket case who flunks the one-look-from-across-a-crowded-room test, he also reportedly pushed the false notion that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. Stephen Hadley, formerly on the board of ANSER (Advancing National Strategies and Enabling Results, getting a big boost from the “war on terror”), was associated with efforts to pump up and to profit from militarism and “homeland security” in the 1990s, well before 9/11. Condoleezza Rice has been a Republican operative, to use Robert Novak’s phrase, since the 1980s, dating at least from when she was part of GOP Governor Pete Wilson’s attempt to redistrict California to benefit Republicans. She was also a delegate to the Republican national convention back when. None of these individuals has worked alone.

– It is also highly possible that Bush simply may not have the clout to fire anyone who works for Cheney, even with ample cause. If so, the Bush-Cheney administration is basically one big security breach.

By the way, logically, it is also possible that some of Bush’s people are sticking with him from motives other than loyalty. Financial remuneration, direct or indirect, might be one of them. The White House press corps seemingly does not ask whether key personnel, officially working for the public, are receiving money or other things of value (the phrase used in federal courts) from some source other than the taxpayers. Are all these individuals so intently harming the public really being paid only by the public?