Posted by Jay Livingston
Political ideology shapes what we see and what we consider important, as I’ve blooged recently (here and here). Ideology also skews what we remember and how we remember it.
The worst terrorist attack on this country happened on Sept. 11, 2001. George W. Bush had taken office nine months earlier on Jan. 20, 2001. Yesterday, Rudy Giuliani said, referring to Bush’s two terms,“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States.” Here’s the video.
He is not the only one to make this mistake. Bush’s former press secretary Dana Perino left the White House at the end of Bush’s term and took a job at Fox News, where in 2009 she told viewers, “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” (A video is here. Push the slider to the 0:35 mark.)
I do not think that Giuliani and Perino are deliberately lying. It’s just that their political views have prevented them from seeing or remembering the facts. The belief that George W. Bush effectively prevented terrorist attacks does not square with the fact that the attacks of 9/11 happened when Bush had been in office for nine months. If the facts don’t fit the belief, too bad for the facts. They are no match against the need for cognitive consistency.
What is striking about the Giuliani/Perino view is how widespread it is. I have long thought that one of the great public-relations achievements of the Bush administration was its ability to create the impression that the attacks happened on someone else’s watch. Many people seem to believe that it was someone else’s fault, though they never get around to thinking who that might be. Maybe Obama.
Even today, few people publicly blame the Bush administration for being asleep at the switch. That is certainly true of Giuliani. He loves to recount his reaction on that day.
| At the time, we believed that we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, “Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.” |
The Bush-Cheney administration had been in office for nine months, getting regular reports from its terrorism experts like Richard Clarke warning of Al Qaeda, reports that Bush-Cheney discounted. Clarke, when he heard the news on the morning of Sept. 11, said to himself, “Al Qaeda.”
Rudy Giuliani said, “Thank God George Bush is our president.”
Given his public commitment to Bush, Giuliani could not very well publicly acknowledge any facts suggesting that Bush was at all responsible for the attacks. It seems that he cannot even acknowledge those facts to himself. And so he winds up making a statement that is so obviously wrong the video instantly flies around the Internet (or at least around the leftward territories).
2 comments:
Interesting article. I liked it, but I fear you are more sympathetic than you should have been. You are rightly amazed that Republicans have been so successful at convincing people that 9/11 happened on someone else's watch. This is done intentionally. That's why it is more likely that Giuliani and Perino are, in fact, intentionally lying. No data to support that supposition, and I understand why you are giving them the benefit of the doubt. It's just implausible. Nobody fact checked their speeches? Unlikely.
Perino was obviously not speaking from a prepared text. She was taking part in a discussion. So I don’t think she was lying. She was just saying something that fit with her perceptions, not with the facts.
As for Giuliani, here’s what Snopes says.
“Some outlets, such as New York City-based blog Gothamist initially mocked what was framed as a mortifying omission on Giuliani's part but later walked back the assessment after a video of the former mayor's complete remarks emerged, noting that ‘it appears Rudy is specifically referring to the eight years after Bush signed the Patriot Act’ (on 26 October 2001).
“NBC Nightly News editor Bradd Jaffy shared the most relevant portion of that longer clip, which contained important context as well as documenting that Giuliani indeed talked about 9/11 and was referring to the [nearly] eight years after that event (i.e., the remainder of President George W. Bush's administration) as the period in which ‘we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States.’”
So while Giuliani is not lying, he is deliberately misleading. He wants us, in evaluating Bush’s protecting the country against terror, to ignore the first nine months of the Bush term and think only of the 7¼ years (which equals 8 in Giuliani’s math) following 9/11. That fits with what I said about the PR coup of fostering the idea that someone else must have been president on Sept. 11, 2001.
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