This is beyond the beyond any more. The fact that Newsweek bothers to print this man’s horseshit or that Charlie Rose just sits there and allows this kind of dissembling of reality to be pissed into his lap on his own show, without the dignity of a rebuttal of any facts whatsoever, says just as much if not more about the sad sack state of our scions of the Fourth Estate than it does about the pitifully diseased character of Karl Rove.

You are not going to believe this, well, actually you will… According to Karl Rove (on Charlie Rose ), the Bush Administration did not want Congress to vote on the Iraq War resolution in the fall of 2002, because they thought it should not be done within the context of an election. Rove, you see, did not think the war vote should be “political”.

Moreover, according to Rove, that “premature vote” led to many of the problems that cropped up in the Iraq War. Had Congress not pushed, he says, Bush could have spent more time assembling a coalition, and provided more time to the inspectors.

George Orwell had it nailed decades ago with his treatise “Looking Back On The Spanish War” when he wrote….

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence… So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth…

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’–well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five–well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs–and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

Following up on this very theme is this piece by Joseph Palermo on The Huffington Post, on this somewhat clever comparison of the post-modernism of Karl Rove and Michel Foucault…

In his 1970 book, The Order of Things, the French philosopher Michel Foucault proclaimed that the concept of man “is an invention of recent date” and would soon disappear, “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Foucault and other postmodernists argued that the individual self (or subject) is an ideological construct, and that there is no “truth” aside from discursive myths society perpetuates and constructs through language and thought. Karl Rove, with his recent history lesson on the Charlie Rose show, has posited a similar set of ideas. For Rove, like Foucault, there is no such thing as objective “truth,” only assertions mediated through an ever-shifting discourse where the past and the future matter little and are infinitely malleable.

Rove’s recounting of the run-up to the Iraq invasion is not, as some commentators called it, historical “revisionism.” Historians who revise history must do so through constructing an argument. Any historical argument must have the minimal prerequisite of an evidentiary base. What Rove has given us is not an argument but an assertion, and it is an assertion devoid of evidence in the historical record whatsoever. Worse still, it is an assertion that is diametrically opposed to the record. It is a sad and cynical display that would make even George Orwell’s jaw drop.

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(Originally Posted November 30, 2007)