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President Bush's Moral Relativism |
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Cokie Roberts rode along with President Bush yesterday as the president and his family went to personally greet the Pope at Andrews Air Force Base. (By the way, I find it odd that the president chose to give special treatment to the Pope by greeting him in this way). Roberts reported, with no apparent sense of irony, and no further comment, that "The thing [President Bush] likes about the pope is that he speaks with moral clarity about certain truths and that he does not believe in moral relativism."
This is risible, simply put, it is a joke. Bush likes to invoke "moral clarity", and apparently believes he shares this quality with the pope, but reality says otherwise. A real reporter might note some of the facts that contradict Bush's assertion, or might even confront the president with these facts, though that is surely hard to do when you're cozily sitting in the presidential limousine. I'll highlight just a few examples of Bush's moral relativism –there are many, many more:
- Bush has allied the U.S. with Uzbekistan, a nation that actually boils people alive. This is textbook moral relativism: Bush dismisses the absolute truth that torture is wrong and concludes that it is ok to condone torture (or even to do torture–see below) when it helps our interests.
- The Bush administration has sent prisoners to countries with abysmal human rights records, knowing that the prisoners would almost certainly be tortured. He has also allied the U.S. with many such countries (see also Uzbekistan, above). Of course, Bush probably doesn't see this as that big a deal as he has approved torture himself.
- Many people see the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as moral absolutes. In fact, Bush swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. But he believes he has the right to violate the Constitution and other laws under certain circumstances.
The reality is that it is difficult to come up with moral absolutes that always, under all circumstances, trump other considerations. One might say life is an absolute principle (Bush said as much to Cokie Roberts). But what if you have to take a life to save a life? In Bush's world, there are, of course, plenty of exceptions to the moral absolute of human life: the death penalty is one example, the invasion of Iraq is another. Bush likes to describe the world in black and white terms when he makes speeches, but his own actions recognize the world, even as he sees it, is more complicated.
Bush's prim, sanctimonious invocation of moral absolutes is laughable. It's like being lectured on accounting ethics by Ken Lay (were he alive to do so). When a journalist passes along Bush's ridiculous, and easily contradicted, statements in this area without comment, as Roberts did, she comes off looking like a mouthpiece or stenographer, not a journalist.
Dan Froomkin has my back on this one: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005 041100879.html